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Module 2 Reflection Questions — Planetary Characters and Description

(For your journal, not a graded exercise — see your Research Journal. No single right answer. These are module-level: they ask you to hold multiple lessons of Ch. 3 together, not to repeat any single lesson's own Workbook reflection questions §6 or §7, which stay at the single-lesson level.)

  1. Lesson 4 (dignity) and Lesson 5 (relationship) are presented as two independent systems — one asking how strong a planet is in isolation, the other asking how it relates to another planet or the sign it occupies — and the Ratio of Effects table (v.59–60) then combines them as a strict priority ladder, not a sum. Now that you hold both lessons together: what would go wrong with a chart judgment if a student treated dignity and relationship as two scores to be added, rather than checking dignity first and only falling back to relationship when none of the dignity tiers apply? Ground your answer in the actual check-order, not just the general idea that "order matters."

  2. Lesson 1 draws the benefic/malefic line for all nine grahas, but two of them (Mercury, the Moon) are conditional rather than fixed. Lesson 5 then shows that natural relationships are calculated independently per planet and are not guaranteed to be mutual. Do these two facts — conditional benefic/malefic status, and asymmetric relationships — point to a shared pattern in how BPHS treats a planet's "nature," or are they unrelated quirks of two separate verse groups? Argue your position using the specific verses involved, not a general impression.

  3. Lesson 3 is explicitly reference/lookup material (physical descriptions, dhātu, abode, taste, tree, season) with a caution that some of it (Digbala) is a preview of a fuller system taught later (Ch. 29), while other parts (dhātu, Dhātu/Mūla/Jīva) are flagged as doing real interpretive work sooner (diagnostic judgments, Horary). Having now finished the module, which specific correspondence from Lesson 3 do you expect to actually apply in later chart work, and which do you expect to remain background color you rarely use directly? Defend your split using what the lesson itself says about each correspondence's downstream use, not a guess.

  4. Lesson 6's Upagraha chain reuses the name "Ketu" for a shadow point that is explicitly not the graha Ketu taught in Lesson 1 — the same word meaning two different things within one chapter. Of all eight Module Objectives in Module 2 — Planetary Characters and Description, which one would you be least confident defending under follow-up questions right now — not recalling it, but explaining why it's true and where exactly BPHS states it? What specifically makes that one harder than the rest, and what will you do before the Module 2 Assessment to close the gap?

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