Puṣpa = Puṣya!

First published 2 August 2008 · revised and extended 2 November 2026. The 2008 note stands as it was, apart from the diacritics; everything after the first rule is new, and the figures are drawn on the page.

We learned in a recent course on Ayurvedic fertility and conception that the woman’s uterus has a “flowering period” 9 days after ovulation, appropriately named puṣpa (Sanskrit for flower) when conception is most likely.

I think it’s interesting and telling that, if all the village women ovulate on the same day, say on the full moon, that the puṣpa period would then fall after the 8/28 section of the zodiac from the full moon, or in other words the yogi point of the chart of ovulation, calculated via the Puṣya nakṣatra, the eighth lunar mansion, used in the definition of āyus or life.

Therefore, the village conceptions would be on the day fullest, most healthy, most fulsome astrologically.

Amazing!

More beauty from Ayurvedic Astrology.

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Eighteen years on

The note above is five sentences long and makes three claims at once: one about a word, one about the body, and one about the sky. I still like all three. But in 2008 I let the exclamation mark do the work the sources should have done. So here are the sources, a few drawings, and an honest arithmetic of the sky-claim — which turns out to hold under a condition the note did not state.

The word

Puṣpa is a flower. Puṣya is the eighth nakṣatra. Both are traditionally derived from the one root puṣ, “to thrive, to be nourished, to flourish”, the root that also gives puṣṭi, nourishment, and poṣaṇa, nourishing. Puṣya is literally the Nourisher; the Taittirīya Saṃhitā calls it Tiṣya, and its deity is Bṛhaspati, the priest of the gods. A flower is what a plant does when it is nourished enough to make fruit. That is the whole equation of the title, and it was a better equation than I knew, because the Āyurvedic texts use puṣpa for something more particular than a flower.

The flower in Vāgbhaṭa

In the Śārīrasthāna of the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya, the chapter on the descent of the embryo turns early to the month. The menses, rajas, born of rasa, flow for three days each month from the twelfth year to the fiftieth (Śā. 1.7). Then, at verse 21, the lotus:

Aruṇadatta’s gloss makes the simile explicit: the lotus that stood open through the day draws itself into a bud when the day has passed, “because that is its nature”; in the same way, when the ṛtu of twelve nights has passed, the yoni contracts, and contracted, does not take the seed. Then Aruṇadatta’s prose line introducing verse 23 gives the word its reason:

So in the text puṣpa is the menses: the flower that announces the fruit. The verses that follow count the month from it. For three days from the first sight of the puṣpa the woman keeps a plain, quiet, celibate regimen, on a bed of darbha grass, eating a little barley cooked in milk; on the fourth day she bathes, dresses in white, and looks first at her husband (Śā. 1.23–26). Then the question Aruṇadatta raises on her behalf — is the ṛtu only those three days? — gets its answer:

Twelve nights of season, the first three set aside, and the eleventh; even nights for a son, odd for a daughter. Suśruta’s Śārīrasthāna has twelve nights too — counted, in Bhishagratna’s rendering, from the end of the flow — and the same lotus (chapter 3, his verses 4–7). After the twelfth night the lotus closes.

Fifteen verses after the flower, in the same chapter, the sky arrives. The rite for a son, puṃsavana, is to be done under one particular nakṣatra:

Puṣpa at verse 23, Puṣya at verse 38: the flower and the Nourisher already stand side by side in Vāgbhaṭa’s chapter on conception, and Aruṇadatta’s note on the second is as plain as his lead-in to the first — puṣye means “at the time joined with the Puṣya nakṣatra”. The 2008 note did not know this. The title was truer than the note.

Where the ninth day falls

The note’s “flowering period 9 days after ovulation” is a different flower from the text’s. The text’s puṣpa opens the month; the course’s opens three weeks into it, and ovulation, which these texts have no word for, stands between them. The 2008 note does not say where its nine days came from, and I will not reconstruct the course’s reasoning. But the number has a modern reading that is hard to miss. In the best-known study to watch implantation happen in ordinary conceptions — daily urine from 221 women trying to conceive, 189 analysable pregnancies — the 141 pregnancies that lasted had implanted six to twelve days after ovulation, 84 per cent of them on day 8, 9 or 10. Of the conceptions that implanted by day 9, 13 per cent were lost early; of those on day 10, 26 per cent; on day 11, 52 per cent; later than that, 82 per cent. The ninth day after ovulation is the middle of the window in which the womb takes the seed and keeps it — in the text’s own image, the day the lotus is widest. “Flowering” is as good a word for it as any.

The Moon’s ninth day and the Yogi point

Now the sky-claim. The note supposes a village in which every woman ovulates at the full moon, and says that nine days later the Moon would have passed the “8/28 section of the zodiac from the full moon” — Puṣya’s own address, the eighth mansion whether the list is counted with twenty-seven or with Abhijit’s twenty-eight — and that this is the Yogi point of the chart of ovulation. Here is the arithmetic the note skipped.

The Moon moves 13°11′ a day against the stars, almost one mansion of 13°20′. In nine days it moves 118°35′, which is 8.9 mansions: counted inclusively from a start near the head of a mansion, the Moon’s ninth day falls in the ninth mansion and its eighth day in the eighth — Puṣya’s ordinal from Aśvinī. That much is just the Moon’s motion, and it is the resonance the note heard.

The Yogi point is a different construction. The formula, as it is usually given, is the Sun’s longitude plus the Moon’s plus 93°20′; and 93°20′ is the first degree of Puṣya, seven mansions on from the start of Aśvinī, so the Yogi point is the chart’s nitya-yoga counted from Puṣya instead of from Aries. The Sun’s longitude is part of it. That means the ninth-day Moon and the Yogi point are not the same thing, and one line of algebra says exactly when they agree. Write S for the Sun’s sidereal longitude at ovulation and M for the Moon’s. Nine days on the Moon is at M + 118°35′; the Yogi point is at S + M + 93°20′; their difference is S − 25°15′. The Moon has dropped out of it. Full moon or new, the ninth-day Moon stands on the Yogi point of the ovulation chart exactly when the Sun is at 25°15′ of Aries, and otherwise misses it by the Sun’s distance from that degree. The village the note imagined would have to ovulate at the full moon that falls with the Sun there and the Moon in Viśākhā — a Vaiśākha full moon, in May — and at no other.

So the note’s “therefore” is true for one full moon a year — give or take the few degrees by which that year’s full moon misses 25°15′ — and false by a measurable angle for the other eleven. I like the note better for knowing this. A coincidence that holds once a year is a muhūrta, not a law, and Jyotiṣa is made of muhūrtas. The dial below lets you turn the Sun and watch the two points part and meet.

Sun at ovulation, sidereal

ovulation at the full moon at the new moon

The village

And the “if” — every woman ovulating at the full moon — remains an if. Among the longest records on the question are twenty-two women’s menstrual diaries, some kept for thirty-two years, analysed in 2021 against three lunar cycles, the synodic, the tropical and the anomalistic. For the women under thirty-five, menses fell at the full or new moon for just under a quarter of the recorded time; over thirty-five, for about a tenth; and the coupling weakened with more artificial light at night. There were also a few particular years — 1961, 1979, 1997, 2015 — in which most of the women whose diaries covered them were in step with the full or new moon, which the authors connect to the three lunar cycles coming into step at about eighteen-year intervals. Intermittent synchrony, then, and not a village clock. The note’s village is a thought experiment, and I keep it as one.

Puṣya in the sky

Last, the mansion itself. Puṣya is three faint stars, γ, δ and θ Cancri, set around the Praesepe, the Beehive cluster, which the old Indian star lists describe as meghavat, cloud-like. δ Cancri, the brightest of the three, sits on the ecliptic to within a tenth of a degree, and the cluster lies a degree and a quarter north of the ecliptic, at about 103½° sidereal — inside Puṣya’s span of 93°20′ to 106°40′, at the start of its fourth pāda. The Greeks and Romans saw the same cloud as a manger, Phatnē, Praesepe, with two asses feeding at it, the Aselli: γ and δ Cancri are still Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis. The Nourisher, the Manger, and the emblem modern writers give the nakṣatra, a cow’s udder (the old verse that gives the nakṣatras their shapes has an arrow): three traditions put food in the same patch of sky.

“Pushpa = Pushya”, I wrote, with an exclamation mark. I would now write it with the equals sign meaning what equals signs mean in Jyotiṣa: not identity, but a count that comes out the same. Flower and Nourisher share a root; the text that names the flower names the mansion fifteen verses later; the Moon’s eighth day is its eighth mansion; and once a year, at the Vaiśākha full moon, the ninth-day Moon and the Yogi point come within a few degrees of one point, and in some years to the point itself. More beauty from Ayurvedic Astrology — that line I keep as it was.

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Related: The Twenty-Seven Stations (Puṣya as the second ten days of the womb, the trophoblast and the missed period) · The Ten Descents (the ten months of the womb) · The Nakṣatra Guṇa Wheel · Ask Vāgbhaṭa (the translation quoted here, searchable).

References

1. Vāgbhaṭa, Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, Śārīrasthāna 1.7, 1.21–27 and 1.38–40, with Aruṇadatta’s Sarvāṅgasundarā; the English is from my own translation (Renay Oshop, Vāgbhaṭa’s Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, with the commentaries of Aruṇadatta and Hemādri). The line “śuddhaṃ ca raktaṃ puṣpasaṃjñam…” is Aruṇadatta’s prose lead-in to verse 23, printed with the root text in my edition.
2. Suśruta, Suśrutasaṃhitā, Śārīrasthāna 3 (the twelve nights, the first three excluded; the lotus that folds at nightfall): K. L. Bhishagratna’s translation, vol. 2 (Calcutta, 1911), chapter III, verses 4–7.
3. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899), s.vv. puṣ, puṣpa (“the menstrual flux”, citing Suśruta), puṣya, puṣṭi, poṣaṇa, tiṣya.
4. Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.4.10 (the nakṣatra list with Tiṣya and Bṛhaspati); on the “cloud-like” description and the identification with γ, δ, θ Cancri, see the article “Pushya” in Wikipedia, and E. Burgess, Translation of the Sûrya-Siddhânta (1860), notes to chapter VIII. The shapes verse (aśvādirūpaṃ turagāsya-yonī…, Puṣya an arrow) is usually assigned to the Muhūrtacintāmaṇi, 2.59–60; this page does not check it against an edition. The udder is the emblem in the modern handbooks (Harness, de Fouw).
5. A. J. Wilcox, D. D. Baird and C. R. Weinberg, “Time of implantation of the conceptus and loss of pregnancy,” New England Journal of Medicine 340 (1999), 1796–1799: 221 women, 189 analysable pregnancies; implantation 6–12 days after ovulation, 84 % on days 8–10; early loss 13 % by day 9, 26 % day 10, 52 % day 11, 82 % later.
6. C. Helfrich-Förster, S. Monecke, I. Spiousas, T. Hovestadt, O. Mitesser and T. A. Wehr, “Women temporarily synchronize their menstrual cycles with the luminance and gravimetric cycles of the Moon,” Science Advances 7 (2021), eabe1358.
7. The Yogi point: Sun + Moon + 93°20′, the sum reduced below 360°, the lord of the resulting nakṣatra being the Yogi planet — the formula as given across the modern Jyotiṣa handbooks; no classical locus is named for it in those handbooks, and the 2008 note names none.
8. Mean motions used in Figure 3: Moon 13.176° a day, 9 days = 118.59°; one nakṣatra = 13°20′; Puṣya 93°20′–106°40′. The condition for the ninth-day Moon to fall on the Yogi point, S = 118°35′ − 93°20′ = 25°15′, is independent of the Moon’s phase.
9. Star positions (J2000) for Figure 4 from the Hipparcos/SIMBAD values; Praesepe (M44) at RA 8h40.4m, Dec +19°40′, which is tropical longitude 127.35°, latitude +1.28°, hence sidereal 103.5° with the Lahiri ayanāṃśa of 23°51′ at J2000. δ Cancri’s ecliptic latitude is +0.08°.

Figures 1–4 are drawn on the page. Figure 3 is computed in the browser from the mean motions in reference 8; without scripting it shows the ring alone.