Shasha

Shasha is one of the five Pancha Mahapurusha yogas, the great-person combinations of jyotisha, and it is the yoga of Saturn. It forms when Saturn occupies its own sign, Capricorn or Aquarius, or its sign of exaltation, Libra, while standing in a kendra, an angular house from the ascendant. The tradition reads Shasha as conferring the Saturnian virtues in strength: endurance, discipline, authority won through labour, command over others and over resources, and a capacity for sustained effort, giving a person of the powerful and self-made type, though the tradition also notes Saturn's harder edge. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the yoga is a defined placement of Saturn in dignity and angularity, one of the five that together mark an exceptional nativity when the planet is strong and unafflicted.

Saturn's exaltation in Libra, a sign ruled by Venus, gives Shasha a mixed classical reception: some commentators stress that Saturn there is strong by dignity but still operating in the house-matters of a planet whose nature is largely foreign to its own, so the yoga's harder discipline and its confer of authority are read as coming at some personal cost, a note the tradition attaches to Shasha more than to the other four. The disagreement over reckoning appears here as well: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra ties the yoga to the ascendant, while Mantreswara in the Phaladeepika extends it to the Moon, and Saturn's association with servants, labourers and the socially marginal in classical significations is sometimes cited by commentators to explain why Shasha, alone among the five, is occasionally read as bestowing power gained through struggle or through people of low station rather than by birthright.

Shasha is the Saturn member of the class, and Saturn's qualifying signs, Capricorn, Aquarius and Libra, give it the same three-sign basis as Mars, Jupiter and Venus. The name is glossed as the hare in most treatments, and as with the swan of Hamsa the animal names are traditional labels whose reasons are not always explained by the sources that use them.

The class is set out in Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka, one of the foundational Sanskrit handbooks of the sixth century, and in the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the large compilation that later tradition treats as its principal authority and whose date of composition is itself a matter of scholarly disagreement. Where the two differ in detail, later commentators generally follow Parashara.

That disagreement about dating is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra survives in manuscripts and printed editions that vary between themselves, and it is not securely datable as a single composition; treating it as an unproblematic ancient authority is a habit of popular writing rather than a finding of textual scholarship.

The two texts differ in emphasis as well as in date. Brihat Jataka is compact and treats the yogas as one topic among many in a work of a few hundred verses; the Parashara compilation is far longer, more systematic and more concerned with dasha timing, and it is from the second that the modern practice of testing every combination against its planetary period principally derives. Reading the class through one text or the other gives noticeably different weight to timing.

Sources Brihat JatakaVarahamihira with Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed), Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree