When the user provides a Vedic birth chart (as structured text, a screenshot, or an export from software like Jagannatha Hora / AstroSage / Parashara's Light) and wants a reading, predictions, life guidance, or "what does my chart say," produce a long, ceremonial, beautifully typeset PDF reading grounded in P.V.R. Narasimha Rao's three books (bundled in this skill). The reading covers a high-level life-area synthesis followed by a house-by-house breakdown, a Vimshottari dasha forecast, identified yogas, and a full remedies section. Every substantive claim is traceable to a specific page of the source books. Trigger this skill whenever the user mentions Vedic astrology, jyotish, a janma kundali, a rasi chart, a birth chart with planetary placements in Indian style, a D-9/navamsa, a dasha period, or asks for predictions/readings/life guidance from astrology — even if they don't explicitly say "Vedic" or "PDF." If in doubt, assume they want this skill.
A skill for producing long, traceable, book-grounded Vedic astrology readings as beautiful PDFs, from a user-supplied birth chart.
Is: a reading engine. The user brings a chart (computed elsewhere — Jagannatha Hora, AstroSage, Parashara's Light, screenshot of a paper chart). You synthesize and deliver a polished PDF reading, every claim of which you can point to a book and page for.
Is not: an ephemeris or chart calculator. Do not attempt to compute planetary positions from a birth time — that's not what this skill does and the books are unambiguous about needing accurate software for calculation (Textbook preface, p.ix).
Why this separation matters: calculation errors compound silently and ruin readings. By refusing to compute, we keep the skill honest.
Three books, all by P.V.R. Narasimha Rao, all in the Parashari tradition, all internally consistent:
| Filename | Short cite |
|---|
| Full title |
|---|
| What it is |
|---|
vedic_astro_textbook.pdf | Textbook | Vedic Astrology: An Integrated Approach (2000) | 515-page reference textbook. Primary source for houses, yogas, dashas, interpretation methodology, and remedies. |
book1-for-CD.pdf | Lessons-I | Lessons on Vedic Astrology, Volume I (Lessons 1–45) | 122-page pedagogical companion. Sequential lessons with example charts. Useful for grounding teaching-style explanations and for example-chart analogies. |
book2-for-CD.pdf | Lessons-II | Lessons on Vedic Astrology, Volume II (Lessons 46–77) | 149-page continuation. Advanced techniques. |
These files live at the root of this skill and are opened with the Read tool (they are PDFs — use the pages: parameter to scope). The Textbook is the spine of most readings. The Lessons volumes are for supplementing with examples and teaching-style language.
The author's style is precise, unornamented, slightly engineer-flavored. The books' predictive content is organized by numbered yogas, bhava meanings, and dasha effects — structure that makes citation easy. Lean into that structure.
The user asked for traceability, so every substantive claim in the final PDF gets an inline citation. "Substantive" means: any statement about what a placement means, predicts, implies, or requires as a remedy. Generic framing sentences don't need citations. When in doubt, cite.
Format: bracket-inline, right after the claim. Use these exact shortcuts:
[Textbook Ch 7, p.67] — chapter + internal book page[Textbook §34.2, p.451] — when you want to point at a subsection (preferred for remedies)[Lessons-I L16, p.65] — Lessons Volume I, Lesson 16, page 65[Lessons-II L54, p.22] — Lessons Volume II, Lesson 54, page 22Internal book page numbers (the ones printed on the page) — not PDF page numbers. The Textbook's printed pages happen to start counting from the real Chapter 1 (internal p.3 = PDF p.16). When you open the book at runtime, note both numbers; cite only the printed one. A reader (or a skeptical friend of the native) should be able to open the PDF, jump to the printed page, and find the source line within a few paragraphs.
Do not fabricate citations. If a claim you're about to make isn't grounded in a page you can point to, either (a) drop the claim, or (b) go find the grounding. If a claim you want to make is common to all Vedic astrology and found in many places, cite the most canonical location in the Textbook — usually the chapter introducing that concept (see references/source_map.md).
Do not paraphrase too thinly. Paraphrase enough that the reading is in natural prose, but the claim behind the paraphrase must exist in the source. If you're stretching to extrapolate, call it out with hedged language ("Rao hints at this — see Textbook p.X — though he does not state it outright.").
Follow these steps in order. Each step says why it's there.
The user gives you a chart. It may be:
Parse it into a structured digest before doing any analysis. The digest must include:
If the input is an image, extract what you can and then restate the digest back to the user, asking them to confirm or correct before you start writing the reading. This is critical: image OCR of Indian-style charts is lossy and mis-reading a planet's house cascades into every later claim. A 10-second confirmation from the user is much cheaper than regenerating a 30-page PDF.
If an image is low-resolution or ambiguous, say so and ask for a text chart.
If the input is a software PDF, use the pdf skill or the Read tool to extract planet positions.
Minimum viable input: lagna, nine planet positions by sign+house, and current Mahadasha lord. Without these the reading cannot be responsibly produced — refuse and ask the user for them.
Open references/source_map.md — this is the index that maps every type of claim (house meaning, yoga, dasha effect, remedy) to the specific chapter(s) and page(s) in the books where it's discussed. Keep it mentally loaded as you write.
Read references/houses.md for the 12-bhava briefing (karakas, significations, and which pages in the Textbook discuss each).
Read references/life_areas.md for the synthesis mapping — it tells you which houses/lords/karakas/divisional charts together form each life-area judgment.
Read references/remedies.md for the remedy routing — it's a digest of Textbook Chapter 34 with page pointers.
Read references/dasha_analysis.md for how Rao approaches dasha interpretation (house-based, sub-period chaining).
These reference files are navigation indexes, not substitutes for the books. For any specific claim, actually open the relevant book page and ground the claim in what Rao wrote there. The references get you to the right page quickly; they don't replace reading it.
Before writing prose, build a structured plan (as an internal note — you don't need to show the user). The plan should cover:
Why this structure: the books do not themselves produce synthesized life-area readings — they explain technique. The skill's value-add is synthesizing that technique into a coherent reading for one specific chart. The house-by-house section grounds the synthesis in primary technical material; the life-area synthesis is the derived product. Both are necessary. Skipping the house-by-house section makes the reading ungroundable; skipping the synthesis makes it dry and useless to the native.
Prose conventions:
Use the bundled script:
python scripts/render_pdf.py <reading.json> <output.pdf>
The script takes a structured JSON of the reading (schema documented in scripts/render_pdf.py header) and renders it with WeasyPrint into a PDF using assets/template.html and assets/styles.css.
Do not write your own HTML or try to invoke WeasyPrint directly. Use the script — it enforces consistent typography, handles Sanskrit script, and formats the Sources appendix correctly.
If WeasyPrint is not installed on the user's machine, the script will print an installation hint (pip install weasyprint). Tell the user. Alternatively, if the user would prefer, the skill can fall back to a Markdown output with the same structure — offer this if PDF rendering fails for environment reasons.
Show the user the resulting PDF path. Offer to:
Rao treats divisional charts as essential, not optional. Guidelines:
If the user provided only the rasi chart, state this as a limitation at the top of the reading: "This reading is based on your rasi chart alone. Divisional charts (D-9, D-10, etc.) would refine specific areas — if you can provide them, I can produce a more granular reading of marriage and career."
Some life areas are emotionally loaded. Handle them with care:
Why this caution matters: a bad prediction delivered with confidence can do real harm. Rao himself warns that even correct knowledge "fed to unworthy students" is a mistake (Textbook Preface, p.xi). Better to hedge and be useful than to be dramatic and wrong.
The Textbook is explicitly an introductory reference. Rao himself writes at the end of Chapter 34 (§34.6, p.459): "no topic has been covered exhaustively… Readers should refer to other textbooks for more details." If a user asks a question that requires depth the source material does not cover (e.g., advanced KP techniques, intricate prashna, detailed muhurta for a specific event), say so — don't manufacture citations from thin material. Recommend they consult a human jyotishi for that depth.
If you find yourself reading the same chart twice (e.g., the user asks a follow-up), don't re-parse from scratch — ask for the previous reading's digest or regenerate the structured JSON and start from there.
SKILL.md (this file)
vedic_astro_textbook.pdf (Rao, 2000 — Textbook)
book1-for-CD.pdf (Rao — Lessons Vol I)
book2-for-CD.pdf (Rao — Lessons Vol II)
references/
source_map.md (topic → book/chapter/page index)
houses.md (12 bhavas with page refs)
life_areas.md (life area → houses/planets/divs mapping)
remedies.md (Textbook Ch 34 distilled)
dasha_analysis.md (Vimshottari interpretation method)
scripts/
render_pdf.py (JSON → PDF via WeasyPrint)
assets/
template.html (Jinja2 template for the reading)
styles.css (typography & layout)
evals/
evals.json (test prompts for iteration)