Vishti

Vishti is the seventh and last of the movable (chara) karanas, but it is set apart from the other six by its inauspicious character. Also called Bhadra, it is personified in tradition as a fierce goddess, and the almanac treats the period it governs as unfavourable, auspicious ceremonies, journeys, and new undertakings are avoided while Vishti or Bhadra is in force, and manuals give rules for reckoning when it falls by day or by night. Despite the name Bhadra, which can mean auspicious, its practical reputation in the panchanga is the opposite, and it is the one recurring karana singled out for caution. It recurs eight times through the month like the other movable karanas. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which Vishti is the recurring half-tithi to be worked around.

Classical sources give Vishti a presiding deity, Yama, the god of death and of dharma, and a planetary association with Shani, Saturn, the harshest of the classical malefics, and this double attribution is generally offered as the explanation for why the karana carries such a consistently unfavourable reputation across the muhurta tradition when every other karana, fixed or movable, is read as at least mildly favourable or neutral. Because Vishti recurs eight times through the month like the other movable karanas but is avoided for auspicious activity every time it falls, contemporary Indian almanacs and panchang mobile applications commonly publish a running calendar of Bhadra timings specifically, distinct from the general tithi and karana tables, so that the inauspicious half-tithi can be checked and avoided without consulting the full panchanga.

Vishti closes the rotation of seven movable karanas and takes positions 8, 15, 22, 29, 36, 43, 50 and 57 of the sixty.

Position p occupies tithi ceiling of p over two, in its first half when p is odd and its second when p is even. So Vishti holds the second half of tithi 4, the first of 8, the second of 11, the first of 15, the second of 18, the first of 22, the second of 25 and the first of 29.

The fourth of those is the one to note. Tithi 15 is Purnima, and Vishti occupies its first half, ending at the moment of opposition itself, after which Bava takes the second half. The karana with the strongest caution attached to it in the whole scheme therefore falls, in every single lunation without exception, on the first half of the full moon day. That is not a doctrine, it is a consequence of Vishti being seventh in a rotation of seven starting from position 2; but it explains why almanacs publish Bhadra timings so prominently around the full moon, and why the caution is met so often by anyone timing an observance to Purnima.

Position 57 is the other one worth marking: it is the last movable karana of the lunation, immediately before the three fixed karanas that carry the month into the new moon.

A karana averages 11 hours and 49 minutes and can run from about ten to about thirteen and a half.