Sun One today… After the homa Bodhinatha explained that even today, some very basic questions are being asked by, which he learned on his recent visit to the Dharma Summit in New Jersey. He wrote a trenchant three point answer to the two basic questions: “Who is a Hindu” and “What is Hinduism.” He read these for us today. Stay tuned to read these in the days ahead after the transcription and audio are posted.

Our new curtains from India arrived several weeks ago. Here we see the rich, royal curtains of Lord Siva Nataraja… with two Nandi’s facing each other…

Hanuman…

This couple from Texas has been here pilgrimage, worshipping and doing sadhana. Today, they joined us for homa and later had darshan with Bodhinatha.

There were very interesting to get Bodhinatha’s advice on passing Hinduism on to their child.

Congratulations to Yogi Japendranatha! After literally several months of challenges with our monastery’s main server storage system, as well as our backup system, he finally installed a very powerful Xserve RAID, which is now storing all our data. He says:

“This system is very expandable. We are only using the left-hand set of seven drives in the unit and are getting an effective capacity of 2.18TB (terabytes), and with our current amount of data we will have 980GB free space, which should last us a good long while. If we ever need more space, we can set up another array with more drives in the right-hand section. For RAID 5 a minimum of three drives is required, which would give a beginning capacity of 800GB. A minimum of two drives could be used to create an unprotected RAID, such as level 0. This system supports array volume expansion, so a new RAID 5 array in the right-hand section could be started with three drives and be added to one drive at a time as necessary, with all data preserved. This is an impressive new technology, a major upgrade from our previous system with its highly sophisticated controller and remote monitoring/management tools. It’s everything we would expect from Apple.”

We have had some spectacularly clear days, cool nights and hot mid-days… Kauai summer actually only gets into full-swing in September…

The ever-shining Iraivan…

and Mount Waialeale…

We are very happy to announce that as of today, someone in a wheel chair can arrive and go all the way to Iraivan without a facing a single step!

These pictures come from yesterdays cement pour… the cement truck has arrived and the small pump is connected all the way to Kadavul…

John Anderson and his team had yesterday completed all the forms and laid in the reinforcement wire…

The pour begins at the temple…

Concrete is an unrelenting task master… every minute it is curing, changing consistency… our team is focused..

Year ago the monks themselves did all the walks you have sees around the Aadheenam…. now we get to stand back and watch the pros do it…

Ok, this section is full, ready to move back…

Next the “screed” begins (a wide board that moves across the top of the forms to level the cement…and find low spots that need to be raised…)

Manning the screed is very hard work…

“Looking Good…”

Next, hand troweling the surface to drive down the aggregate (large gravel pieces) and bring up the “mud” (smooth cement) to make an even surface…

In order to use a pump the cement is quite “wet” …

But we can’t too long… time to lay in the flagstones.

Excellent work! These flagstones are a special, shiny quartzite that appears to have silver, gold, crystal flecks…

It’s an art and a puzzle at the same time… finding just the right pieces…

It’s beautiful!

The cement truck is loaded and ready to move to the next site…

the beginning of Tiruneri just after the Nepali Ganesha is next…

This is where the steps were before… the perspective is a bit deceiving.. it’s not at long as it appears.

We had a temperature reading or 105 degrees F in the sun… You have to keep you fluid intake up… Drink or end up with a splitting headache tonight.

The pour was a great success. We also did the steps down the end of the path over looking the river and made a nice new clean pad for our cow barn..

Our silpi team visited the Kauai County Farm Fair over the weekend. Here they pose with Kauai’s Mayor Brian Baptiste. The Farm Fair is the biggest event of the year on Kauai, with up to 40,000 visitors over three days. There are exhibits of agriculture, community service, businesses, games and rides, as well as nightly entertainment shows.

On display are a wide variety of fruits and vegetables grown by local farmers, including a very fine set of mangos.

Here they talk about the bonsai display with Yogi Japendranatha. Kauai has a large Japanese population, some outstanding experts in these miniature trees.

With some cajoling, part of the group join Sivakatirswami on the ferris wheel. There are other rides, but not for the squeamish…

Round and round they go…

Having bees in your building is considered auspicious to the Hawaiians. But we are going to be doing termite treatment soon and we did not want all these honey bees who had taken up residence in the walls of the Guru Peedam to die… so Kumarswami, Sivakatirswami and Yoginathaswami went to work today for a major “bee extraction.”

We were fortunate that the colony perfectly situated between two studs. This made it relatively easy… But it was filled top to bottom 10 Feet hight by 2 feet wide…

It was a medium sized colony and the comb was perfectly organized.

As per normal behavior most of the honey was at the top and the brood was centered below…

It took our team about 5 hours of hard work… We harvested about 100 pounds of honey and two hives of bees which were place outside in the courtyard. (more about that tomorrow)