RESEARCHING IN JYOTISH
With the advent and ready availability of powerful calculative software, there has arisen a new resurgence of interest in conducting research in jyotish. As more and more individuals have been introduced to jyotish and its fantastic and enormous tools, questions have been raised towards increased exploration of tenets in classical texts. A typical classical text in jyotish is, simply put, a compendium of almost axiomatic principles and rules with little by way of explanation and even lesser still by way of illustrations. Complicating the scene further, is the fact that many of these aphorisms do not seem to work reliably in many charts. One wonders if what has percolated through time from vedic days to today, in the form of written accounts of jyotish, is flawed to a variable extent. Is the reason why many of these rules do not seem to work verbatim because the description of the rules have not survived completely and the fragments seem to work at times and not at others. Perhaps there are conditions that are required to select the tool-box and what we have is missing information about some of these conditions. Serious students of Brihat Parashar Hora Shastra, the most comprehensive text on jyotish describes many dashas or timing systems that must be applied only when certain conditions are met in a chart, hence their modern name of 'conditional dashas'. Conditionality, therefore, is not a foreign concept when studying jyotish. Other examples also exist to corroborate this.
There is, thus, lot of room for exploration and research in jyotish and many of the minds that are well-trained in research methodology and drawn to jyotish would naturally be inclined to explore this further. Some are drawn to discovering new findings and novel combinations because they believe that as the human being has advanced (though some would question that!) over thousands of years, not all that is available in the classical repertoire would address all facets of modern society. The sheer number of professions that are available to the modern person and the changing roles of different sub-populations and genders, according to some, necessitates a review of jyotish rules and principles. Others are trying to find missing links through exploration of nadis and fragmentary texts that are surfacing from time to time.
As software becomes more and more flexible, accurate and sophisticated, a primary usefulness of the speed of computer would be to recalculate charts with different variables and testing of different ayanamshas, different house systems and different factors can become convenient. This used to be simply prohibitively formidable in pre-computer days when calculations by hand was the only tedious alternative.
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