Compatibility — Ashtakoota

Graha Maitri, Gana, Bhakoot & Nadi

The heavy four — twenty-six of the thirty-six points.

Graha Maitri (5 points) — mental wavelength

Take each partner's Moon sign lord and look up their natural friendship — the exact table from the Graha Strength chapter.

Mutual friends score full marks; mutual enemies score zero; the mixed cases fall between.

It speaks to mental wavelength: whether two minds naturally understand each other. Of the eight kootas this is the one with the clearest mechanism, since it reduces to a friendship lookup you already know.

Gana (6 points) — temperament class

Every nakshatra belongs to one of three ganas — you met these across the whole Nakshatras chapter:

Deva (divine) — refined, cooperative, principled.
Manushya (human) — mixed, pragmatic, ordinary.
Rakshasa (demonic) — forceful, intense, self-directed.

Same gana scores full marks. The grid falls off from there, and the Deva–Rakshasa pairing is the weakest — two temperaments that operate on genuinely different registers.

Note that the grid is not symmetric: which partner holds which gana can change the score.

Bhakoot (7 points) — emotional harmony

Bhakoot looks at the mutual position of the two Moon signs — how many signs apart they are, counted both ways.

Three relations score zero out of seven:

| Pair | Name |
|---|---|
| 2/12 | Dwirdwadasha |
| 5/9 | Navapancham |
| 6/8 | Shashtashtaka |

Everything else scores the full 7. It is all-or-nothing — there are no partial bhakoot points.

That makes it the most abrupt koota on the scale: two Moon signs six and eight apart lose 7 points instantly, which alone drops a maximum of 36 to 29.

Nadi (8 points) — constitution

Nadi sorts the 27 nakshatras into three constitutional channels — Aadi, Madhya and Antya, corresponding to the vata, pitta and kapha humours.

The rule is stark: different nadi scores the full 8; the same nadi scores 0. Like bhakoot, all or nothing, and it is the largest single deduction available.

It is classically read as constitutional and health compatibility, and progeny — the reasoning being that two people of the same constitutional type reinforce the same imbalance rather than balancing each other.

Same-nadi is called Nadi dosha, and it is the single most common reason a match is refused.

Remember it

Graha Maitri is the friendship table (5). Gana is Deva/Manushya/Rakshasa (6). Bhakoot is Moon-sign distance, all-or-nothing (7). Nadi is constitution, all-or-nothing (8). Twenty-six points, and the two biggest are pass/fail.

Terms introduced here

Graha Maitri, Gana, Bhakoot, Nadi

The heavier four, carrying 26 of the 36 points: mental wavelength, temperament, emotional harmony, and constitution.

Bhakoot dosha

Moon signs in a 2/12, 5/9 or 6/8 relation score zero of seven, unless a cancellation applies.

Nadi dosha

Both partners in the same nadi scores zero of eight — the single biggest deduction, with classical cancellations.