Module 1 · The Chart's Language
Week 1 — What Jyotish Claims, and the Nine Grahas
Chapters 1 and 2 are Parashara's argument for why a planet's position can mean anything at all. Chapter 3 is then the complete portrait of the nine agents that argument licenses. Nothing else in the book can be taught until the grahas are known, and Chapter 3 is the most load-bearing chapter in the whole of BPHS.
What you should be able to do by the end
Given any planet, in any sign, at any degree, state its natural nature, its dignity, and its relationship to that sign's lord — and explain why those three facts change what the planet is able to deliver.
This is the heaviest reading week in the course, and it comes first. That is deliberate, and you should know why before you start.
Chapter 3 is the longest chapter in Volume 1 and very nearly everything in it is load-bearing. Benefic and malefic. Who each planet is. Exaltation and debilitation, to the exact degree. Which planets treat each other as friends. Almost every technique in the remaining ninety-seven chapters reaches back to something established here. Spread it thin and the rest of the course has no floor to stand on.
So the week is front-loaded on purpose, and two things are deliberately kept light to make room. Chapter 2 — the mapping of grahas to incarnations of Viṣṇu — is three hundred words and doctrinally interesting but technically inert; you read it, you understand its claim, and you move on. And the long correspondence tables in the middle of Chapter 3, the ones giving each planet its metal and its taste and its season, are taught as a principle rather than memorised as a list. Once you see what holds those clusters together, you stop needing to memorise them at all.
Take Chapter 3 in five sittings, not one.
How this week is divided
3 sittings, cut where the subject changes rather than by the clock. Each one is a reasonable place to stop.
Why any of this should work
You will be able to state what Parashara claims a graha actually is, and say why that claim is what makes chart reading possible rather than arbitrary.
Meeting the nine
You will be able to name all nine grahas in Parashara's order, sort them into natural benefics and malefics including the two conditional cases, and describe who each one is as a coherent field of meaning rather than a keyword list.
Dignity, and the relationships between grahas
You will be able to look at any planet in any sign at any degree and say what condition it is in, and how it gets on with the lord of the sign it is sitting in.