If you want the where to be contingent upon all the AND statements put them in parens.
eg:
WHERE (
AND a.paksh = b.paksh
AND a.tithi = b.tithi
AND b.date BETWEEN CURdate( )
AND (CURdate( ) +9)...

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/storage-engines.html
Thats a link to the MySQL site explaining the storage engines and how to set the engine you want to use for your tables.

A couple more hours of staring at the screen and rewriting the statements have finally solved the problem. Both of the select statements needed to be encased in parens.

I am building a site search that involves a union of two tables in two databases and needs to have relevancy factored in.
I do not want to use a full-text or boolean search.

I can search one...