Priti

Priti is the second nityayoga, and its name means affection, love, or delight. In the traditional classification it is an auspicious yoga, one of the favourable configurations the panchanga marks as suitable for beginning good works, forming bonds, and undertaking matters of the heart. Like every nityayoga it is defined by the sum of the solar and lunar longitudes divided into twenty-seven parts, advancing as the two lights draw apart through the month. As one of the five limbs of the daily almanac, tithi, weekday, nakshatra, yoga, and karana, the yoga contributes its own quality to the reckoning of an auspicious moment. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which the twenty-seven yogas each carry a fixed favourable or unfavourable character consulted in selecting a muhurta.

Each nityayoga spans exactly thirteen degrees twenty minutes of the combined solar-lunar longitude, since three hundred sixty degrees divided by twenty-seven gives that figure precisely, which is the same angular width as a full nakshatra, though the two twenty-seven-fold divisions are reckoned from different quantities, a nakshatra from the Moon's longitude alone and a nityayoga from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon together, so a given calendar day's yoga and its nakshatra advance at different rates and only rarely align by name or number. Priti's name is also the ordinary Sanskrit word used across a wide range of religious and literary contexts for affectionate devotion, distinct from kama, desire, or sneha, tender attachment, and classical Sanskrit poetics treats the distinction between these related terms for love and fondness as a genuine point of technical nuance.

Of the five limbs of the panchanga the yoga is the most purely arithmetical, and the only one a person standing outside at night could never read off the sky. Where the tithi measures the Moon's separation FROM the Sun, the yoga measures the two longitudes ADDED together, and cuts the resulting circle into twenty seven equal arcs of thirteen degrees twenty minutes. Priti is the arc from 13 degrees 20 minutes to 26 degrees 40 minutes of that sum. The sum climbs at roughly fourteen degrees ten minutes a day, so a yoga runs about twenty two and a half hours on average, a little shorter than a tithi, and like a tithi it can be skipped between two sunrises or carried across two of them.

The twenty seven arcs are the same width as the twenty seven nakshatras, and Priti is the second arc of the grid in both schemes, which is why the two are often tabulated side by side. They are not the same thing and share nothing but their arithmetic: a nakshatra is a segment of the sky the Moon is physically standing in, while a yoga is a number derived from two positions and belongs to no part of the sky at all. Reading a yoga as a star group is the commonest confusion the term invites, and the shared name of the second position, Bharani, is where it usually starts.

Priti sits among the eighteen yogas classed as favourable. That count matters more than it looks: with eighteen of twenty seven benign, the yoga is a weak filter on its own, and the classical muhurta writers use it as a tie breaker between candidate times rather than as a reason to reject one. A day is not made auspicious by its yoga alone.