VedaChartsJataka Chandrika
Jataka Chandrika, the "Moonlight on Astrology," is a compact natal tract by Venkatesa Pandita, who presents it openly as a digest of the longer Parasara tradition rather than an original work. Suryanarayana Row's 1900 translation walks through the foundational rules of nativity in 78 stanzas: planetary friendships and natures, dasa periods, the Lagna read sign by sign from Aries through Pisces, and a closing meditation on how lordships combine. Where Brihat Jataka opens the door to every branch of horoscopy, Jataka Chandrika hands the reader the smaller, sharper key of Lagna analysis.
Venkatesa Pandita was a medieval South Indian astrologer who set out to do something modest and useful: condense the vast Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, which runs to thousands of verses, into a portable handful that a working astrologer could memorize and carry. The result, Jataka Chandrika, became a standard primer in South Indian jyotish schools for centuries, taught as the bridge between rote rule-learning and live chart reading. Its compact 78 stanzas cover what Parashara would take a hundred verses to say, which is exactly why students from his era to ours have started here. Note that this Venkatesa Pandita is a different person from Venkatesa Daivajna, the later author of Sarvartha Chintamani, and the two are often conflated in catalogues; B. Suryanarayana Row's 1900 English translation is the version that introduced this work to the English-reading world.