Sources

The classical texts behind AstroPal

Every interpretation AstroPal gives is grounded in one of two things: a computed engine fact or a retrieved excerpt from one of the indexed Jyotish texts listed below. Classical works and more — close to two million words — are indexed into 6,140 searchable passages, each carrying its own citation. Every citation names the original śāstra and its classical author. No modern author’s work is quoted or cited.

Texts are grouped by their traditional role in the Jyotish syllabus. For background on how these sources flow into a chat answer, see /methodology.

Foundational scripture

The texts a serious student of Vedic astrology must engage with. BPHS in particular is treated as the canonical authority and the Mnemonic Graph routes most house- and planet-level questions through it first.

• Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra (BPHS)
  by Maharshi Parashara — complete Sanskrit text, 97 chapters
• Brihat Samhita
  by Varahamihira
• Brihat Jataka
  by Varahamihira
• Saravali
  by Kalyana Varma
• Phala Dipika
  by Mantresvara

Jataka (natal-chart) literature

Classical works focused specifically on natal-chart interpretation — character, life path, dasha unfoldment, planetary period effects.

• Jataka Parijata
  by Vaidyanatha Dikshita
• Laghu Jataka
  by Varahamihira
• Jataka Chandrika
• Sarvartha Chintamani
  by Venkatesa Daivajna

Yogas and combinational principles

Reference works that catalogue the planetary combinations (yogas) and their classical interpretations. AstroPal’s yoga auto-detector pulls citations preferentially from these texts.

• Bhavartha Ratnakara
  by Ramanuja
• Jaimini Sutras
  by Maharshi Jaimini
• Chamatkara Chintamani
  by Bhatta Narayana

Specialised branches

Texts focused on Muhurta (electional astrology) and ancillary techniques. The Muhurta module routes through Muhurta Chintamani; compatibility and timing answers draw from these as needed.

• Muhurta Chintamani
  by Rama Daivajna
• Bhrigu Sutram
  attributed to Maharshi Bhrigu

Astronomical foundations

The siddhanta literature underlying the calculations themselves — planetary motion, eclipses, and the mathematics on which every chart rests.

• Surya Siddhanta
• Panchasiddhantika
  by Varahamihira
• Aryabhatiya
  by Aryabhata

How these texts reach you

AstroPal works from the original Sanskrit śāstras — including the complete Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra, Phala Dipika, Laghu Jataka, Bhrigu Sutram and Chamatkara Chintamani in the original. AstroPal’s English renderings are prepared from those Sanskrit texts and independently worded; the Sanskrit remains the source of record, and every citation names the classical work and its author — never a modern translator or edition.

Acknowledgements

Several of the Sanskrit e-texts AstroPal indexes were encoded by the volunteers of sanskritdocuments.org and are used with their permission. Their Jyotisha collection is at sanskritdocuments.org/jyotisha.

Indexing details

Each text was processed through an OCR + translation engine (all Sanskrit texts are translated), then cleaned up and randomly checked for accuracy + chunking pipeline. The output is a passage database queryable by hybrid retrieval (FAISS dense vectors plus SQLite FTS5 lexical search), with cross-encoder reranking. Every retrieved passage carries:

• Citation — human-readable reference such as “Saravali 38:14”.
• OCR confidence score — recorded per passage and available to the ranker. Sources we hold as plain text rather than as a scan carry no OCR score.
• Relevance score — the combined hybrid + reranker score used to rank candidates.

The pipeline source code, OCR cleanup heuristics, and corpus output directory are kept in our internal repository.

What we do not index

• Modern internet horoscope content, blog posts, or Wikipedia-derived material.
• Western tropical astrology texts. AstroPal is strictly sidereal Vedic.
• Modern popular astrology books. Where a modern edition is consulted for retrieval quality, it is held strictly internally: it is never quoted, never cited, and never named in an answer.

Keeping the corpus narrow is the point: it forces every interpretation through a classical lens.

Corpus expansion

New classical texts are added carefully. Each candidate text goes through translation and OCR quality checks, cleanup, manual sample review against the printed source, and a grounding-quality test before being released into the live retrieval index. We prefer fewer, well-indexed texts over a bloated corpus with poor passage quality.

Last updated: 20 August 2026. Classical śāstras and more, 6,140 indexed passages, close to two million words of classical text.