Today is the last day of our phase… tour day… and we had a huge crowd of guests.

Bodhinatha is back home and will be here for another week or so before traveling again.

Paramacharya Palaniswami and Sannyasin Arumugaswami are also back and have brought home glowing reports from the Dharma Conference (see below at the end of TAKA)….

Note: our transcribers and web team are continuing to push on catching up with Bodhinatha’s upadeshas. Inspired Talk and Satguru Speaks audio fans can check out the new talk which is linked today on the side bar and go to the main audio page to navigate to the index of all talks Bodhinatha has given this past year… we still have more to put up, but a number of new ones were added today.

END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of this short 4-day phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming three-day retreat,
until Tritya Tithi, Sun One, Sunday, August 21st.

Hands on granite… a first time wonderment for our guests….

This little one is also amazed.

Getting blessed by a rudraksha tree…

Now we bring you news from New Jersey… You can also read more on today’s Hindu Press International posting

Dharma Summit Report…

from Paramacharya Palaniswami

“It is Tuesday morning and Arumugaswami and I are having the only unscheduled hour of our entire journey, as we wait for the shuttle to take us to our plane and our all-day flight to Hawaii.

We were amazed to see how many there were readers of Hinduism Today and how important the magazine was to them. Also, nearly everyone there had been to Kauai Aadheenam at one time or another and they all look to the Aadheenam and our monastic order with great love and affection.

The final day dedicated to discussion on temple management was very useful. One lady lawyer from Denver spoke on the legal aspects of temple management, including financial and fiduciary responsibility, with a strong emphasis on liability, libel and defamation, even hate crimes. Her talk was quite professional and full of beautiful dharmic ideals, clearly urging temple managers to do what may not have been done in the past: be honest, don’t lie, don’t embezzle temple funds, etc.

We addressed the temple managers to share Gurudeva’s vision that temples and Hindu institutions should be churches for a number of legal and social reasons, which we summarized. We took the opportunity to correct the idea that Churches are Christian only, explaining that Chinmaya Mission USA, Sringiri Mutt in PA, Barsana Dham and Satchidananda’s IYI are all Churches. I think they were surprised to hear that Gurudeva had founded the first Hindu Church in America in 1957.

Later Arumugaswami addressed the group on the subject of Bodhinatha’s 6-point description of their temples, and handed out the illustrated pamphlets we brought for them. They all grabbed them up within two minutes.

When Bodhinatha held up the magazine during his evening keynote speech and said we had copies of Hinduism Today on the HSC table outside, the two boxes we brought we gone in three minutes!

We also had a chance to share with them a brief summary of Iraivan’s endowment and Gurudeva’s genius in creating a perpetual maintenance fund along with the temple, and to briefly caution them about quasi-endowments (more needs to be said about this). In fact, we plan an article based on the legal presentation mentioned above, with a sidebar on real and quasi- endowments as this is a bit technical.

We had told the coordinators before lunch we had to leave by 4pm, so they would not think we were walking out on them when the time came. So, at 4 we both stood up and quietly exited during a presentation. Seeing us leave, the entire room stood up, clapping for two minutes, shouting from across the room “Good-bye” “Aloha” “See you in Hawaii.” It was amazing.

The presenter left the stage and ran after us, to say he will be visiting us in Hawaii again soon. All in all it was startling to see how much the Hawaii monastery means to these people, and they are the leaders in their communities — each one a surgeon or engineer or other high-end professional, each one charmed by Gurudeva and everything he created.