Blog Archives

Another illumined one... our beloved Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami.

No Audio Today

				Live Web Cam Pix!

When one prostrates to Gurudeva's shrine and then looks up... here is what you see.

We have two pilgrims with us. Selvi Jutikadevi Sivaraja on the right from Michigan and Deva Magdalena from Honolulu.

Everyday they attend the morning puja, do Ganga Sadhana, then perform seva during the day and attend the Ganesha puja at 3pm. Jutikadevi is a key team member of our Hinduism Today outreach sevaks, calling subscribers for renewals, keeping in touch with our readership. She does a great job.

Every morning our silpi team comes to Kadavul to get blessings before going to the work site.

Ravi Bikkina and wife visited today for the first time. Ravi's parents had been here before and recommended to the young couple that they should visit the monastery.

Our members, students and close friends in the San Diego area came to Sadhunathan's home for puja. Janahan comes to perform the puja.

The Remarkable Vision	Iraivan Temple Progress Update	Join this historic undertaking. Please contribute generously. Sponsor a stone today! Monthly Report Sponsor a stone Iraivan Wonders
	Order Sacred Rudrakshas or Gorgeous 2003 Iraivan Calendars with Hindu festival days on them. Great for Gifts! All proceeds go to the building fund.

Excitement builds at the Iraivan Temple site as another container arrived today. Yoginathaswami and Teddy, our fork lift driver, assess the situation.

This shipment brought us one 4-faced and two 2-faced Potagai (tops of pillars)

There were also five beams and more smaller stones that make up course 16.

The silpis are masters with the simple but effective tools of levers and blocking.

Karuppiah and Andiappan on the job.

Karuppiah... these men have been here for 18 months now and will be returning home to India in May. A new group is scheduled to arrive before this group departs so there is not a break in the work flow.

Teddy from Kauai Commercial loves to be here and help with the temple... he knows he is part of an historic project.

This is a shot of one of our giant banyan trees... just kidding. This is actually a small bonsai plant.

Another bonsai....

transcription begins

Date: December_05_2002
Title: Hindu Culture and the Temple
Category: Hinduism and Tradition
Duration: 9 min., 47 seconds
Date Given: November 21, 2002
Given by: Bodhinatha

That was a beautiful Namakarana for Shaila Pushpa Sendan. Perhaps we were waiting for Gurudeva's murthi to be present! We postponed the ceremony. It must be for that.

This is our Jivana ritau, our 'Living with Siva' season of the year for four months. So I was giving that some thought. 'Living with Siva, Hinduism's Contemporary Culture'. I thought I would just say a few words on culture this morning. To show some of Gurudeva's central thoughts on culture, there is one page in 'Living with Siva' which has five sutras and they are all on cultural accomplishments. So we will read that first.

"All my devotees are encouraged to learn a skill requiring the use of their hands, such as pottery, sewing , weaving, painting, gardening, baking or the building arts, to manifest creative benefits for family and community.

All my devotees are encouraged to perfect a cultural accomplishment be it a form of art, singing, drama, dance or musical instrument of Siva's ensemble- vina, mridangam, tambura, cymbals and bamboo flute. Aum.

All my devotees are encouraged to embrace Sanskrit as their language of ritual worship, Shum Tyeif as their language of meditation and Tyeif script for offering prayers to the devas through the sacred homa fire. Aum.

All my devotees are encouraged to use the South Indian lunar calendar as a daily guide to auspicious planning for travel, business, innovation, ceremony and major life events. Our year begins with the month of Aries. Aum.

All my devotees are encouraged to adopt the gestures, attitudes, customs, ways of worship, dress and refinements of Tamil Saiva protocol. They learn by living and studying with traditional Saivites. Aum Namah Sivaya."

Where does culture come from? Gurudeva over the years wrote many letters for major events at temples around the world, Kumbhabhishekams. Usually, they would publish the letter in the souvenirs for the temple. I would help him with many of these letters. One of the parts he always wanted to include was to say that the temple was very important to have in a community because it is the temple which sustains the culture.

In other words, if Hindus moved to a place where there is no temple and stay there for generations eventually the culture is going to decline. That is what he is saying. The temple is very important in sustaining the culture. He was very happy to see Hindu temples coming up in the Hindu communities that were newly forming around the world, for that very reason. The culture would sustain. We are talking about generation after generation, not just in those who were the first generation to arrive because they were well trained and were raised near temples. But it is in the subsequent generations that it would tend to decline.

I had a chance to speak on that once in Perth, four or five or six years ago. We attended a Ground-breaking ceremony for the Hindu Temple Society of Western Australia, which was forming a temple in Perth. It was my first trip to Australia and I found out there is a lot of distance between Perth and the rest of the country. It is way over there on the western side. I prepared a talk for that and talks for other things and I wanted to include a statement which said this is a very simple way. One of the higher ranking government officials was there from the Western Provincial government. I wanted her to understand what the temple meant to us as well.

I chose the phrase, "Having a temple manifests greater peace in the individual, harmony at home and tolerance in the community." When I said tolerance, she lit up. "Oh, tolerance! This is good." She was obviously concerned about that. It is always a concern when you have a diversity of ethnic group. The question of tolerance comes up.

It is a very simple way of looking at it, which we will develop by reading something Gurudeva says on this in 'Living with Siva' in a second. But the idea being - Well, who gets influenced first? Well, the individual gets influenced first by becoming more peaceful. If you are more peaceful, what happens? There is more harmony at home, it is proportionate, but that is with other people. First, what is inside of us is influenced by the temple, our inner peace. Our most immediate group which is the home is more harmonious because we are more peaceful. The less peaceful we become on the inside or the more disturbed we become on the inside, then the more disharmony there is in the home because it is a reflection of it. Someone who is really unsettled and upset on the inside, cannot stand for everything to be harmonious. They have to disturb it. It is just, you know, "I am feeling terrible, I am going to make you feel terrible too, I am going to disturb things." It is a kind of an instinctive quality. It comes along with the instinctive nature. "If I am miserable, I am going to make you miserable. If I am unhappy, I am going to make you unhappy. If I am not peaceful, I am going to disturb the home with inharmonious conditions."

We get around all that by the temple. By learning how to become peaceful in the temple, we influence our home and because our home is harmonious, we then influence the community. Community harmony is tolerance, greater tolerance for differences, greater ability to get along.

There is a very nice paragraph by Gurudeva in 'Living with Siva'. I wanted to share.

"When culture is flooding out of the temple, our actions are productive and our minds are creative, our speech is pure, our hearts rejoice and we become good citizens. Religion makes us good citizens because we are peaceful inside and we want peace in our land. Peace comes first from the individual. It is unrealistic to expect peace from our neighbors unless we are peaceful first. Unless we make ourselves peaceful, through right living, right worship and right religious culture in the home. How can we destroy all of this? It is simple. Stop going to the temple. Culture will begin to go. Refinement and love will begin to go. Arguments will be heard in the homes. Divorces will fill the courts. Stress and mental illness will become the common experience. All because we stopped that one great mystical practice - temple worship. The temple is the great psychiatrist of the Hindu religion. When we forget that, we suffer the consequences of our neglect personally and as a nation. The temple has mystical powers that surpass the greatest psychiatrists on the planet. Our priesthoods have the tools to invoke and perpetuate this power. The temple cannot only analyze your problems, it can give absolution. You can leave the temple wondering what it was bothering you on the way to seek the help of the Deities. So complete is the power of the temple."

transcription ends

MORE UPLIFTING THINGS		Innersearch 2003-4 in India! We just completed the July 17-23 Kauai Innersearch, 2002. Bodhinatha will lead the next Innersearch to India, between Dec 2003 and Jan 2004. We will visit Bangalore and the Iraivan Carving Village, and settle in the South in Tamil Nadu, Click on the above for details on what will be an inspiring journey to our holy land of Bharat!
	Check our children and youth section for new items for the young and young at heart!
1. SIGN OUR GUESTBOOK and receive a FREE GIFT
2. Newest Book: LIVING WITH SIVA
3. Visiting KAUAI'S HINDU MONASTERY
4. Contribute to THANK YOU, GURUDEVA FUND