Sūrya Siddhānta
सूर्यसिद्धान्त
Everyday Hindi: सूर्य सिद्धांत
Classical astronomical treatise underlying many traditional almanacs.
Definition
The Sūrya Siddhānta is a Sanskrit astronomical treatise in fourteen chapters covering mean and true motions, time, eclipses, planetary conjunctions, instruments and cosmography. An earlier version is summarised in Varāhamihira's Pañcasiddhāntikā, while the extant text was revised over later centuries. It remains the basis of many traditional almanacs, and Ebenezer Burgess's English translation (1860) brought it to wider scholarly attention.
Articles that use this term
- Ganita
Shunya: how India gave the world zero, and why it matters to Jyotish
Zero as a placeholder, zero as a number, and the astronomers who needed both to compute the sky.
7 min read · 16 October 2026
- PanchangaExplainer
Tithi: why the Hindu day is a lunar day
Twelve degrees between Sun and Moon: how the tithi is defined, why it varies in length, and why festivals follow it.
6 min read · 14 October 2026
- SiddhantaExplainer
Sidereal and tropical: what the ayanamsa is, and why Lahiri
Two zodiacs, one sky. How the slow wobble of the Earth's axis separates them, and how India chose a standard in the 1950s.
7 min read · 12 October 2026
- Siddhanta
Eclipses in the Indian sky: what is computed and what is kept
How the siddhantas compute a grahana, what Rahu and Ketu stand for in that computation, and sutak as a practice that varies from one tradition to another.
7 min read · 30 September 2026
- SiddhantaExplainer
Gochar explained: transits, sign changes and retrograde motion
What a transit calendar actually lists, why a graha seems to move backwards, and how the classical texts and modern astronomy describe the same motion.
8 min read · 29 September 2026