Graha dṛṣṭi · The planetary glance

Dṛṣṭi is a planet’s glance. The Vedic tradition holds that every graha casts a full aspect on the seventh house and sign from where it sits, the one aspect all planets share. What a planet sees it touches, and it touches with its own nature. Classically a benefic’s glance supports whatever it falls on, a malefic’s presses.

Three grahas are given extra reach. Mars aspects the fourth and eighth from itself, Jupiter the fifth and ninth, Saturn the third and tenth, each counted inclusively from the planet’s own place so that its own house is the first in the count. These are read as the standard special aspects across the classical schools.

Unlike the mutual aspects of Western astrology, dṛṣṭi runs one way. The planet looks forward along the zodiac and carries its influence to whatever stands there, while the aspected point does not automatically look back.

A Vedic aspect is a line of sight, not a handshake.

Some schools extend fifth, seventh, and ninth aspects to Rāhu and Ketu; others give the nodes only the universal seventh, and the codex keeps that disagreement rather than settling it. A separate scheme, rāśi dṛṣṭi, the sign-to-sign aspects of Jaimini, works by the category of a sign rather than by houses counted from a planet, and it should not be folded into this one. All of it is read per varga, recomputed in each divisional chart and not only in the rāśi.