Here is Bodhinatha at Chidambaram with his traveling party and Dikshitar priests. Arumugaswami writes:

“Here’s one photo for today, taken after our puja at Chidambaram with Anantanataraj Dikshitar and his son Gurumurthi. Overwhelming powerful vibration at the temple, indeed, the center of the universe!”

Bodhinatha writes:

“Today we returned to Pondicherry with a stop at Chidambaram. Timing was perfect for a long archana while the spatika lingam abhishekam was occurring at the same time. Very uplifting.

“Then a meeting at the French Institute with the head of the manuscript department. We developed a plan for a one week shot in January of key Agama texts to be selected by Sabaratnam.

“Then off to ICYER, Swami Gitananda’s Ananda Ashram for an evening satsang with questions and answers.”

For ever so long, we have longed for a better way to search our vast site. Daily we struggle to narrow in on some obscure fact, verse, chapter of a Gurudeva book. Today we installed a special search field provided by the ever-creative, nearly-omniscient Google. The field is at the bottom of our home page.

When it worked, one of the monks offered this: “Wow! Oh-my-God.” This is another example of “all our needs will always be met.” We had struggled with so many options and had an HT DIG engine that was OK, but was high maintenance and not very fast. Now the engineers at Google have provided, free of cost, exactly what we (and all of our TAKA visitors) need. This searches ALL of our domains and is lightening fast. Check it out next time you want to find a little-known gem on any of our sites.

Kalepi is a Tongan living on Kauai. He has become known as one of the island’s finest craftemen in building walls of the pourous lave rock which is called Moss Rock locally.

Kalepi will be collecting (hand-picking) the best Moss Rock on Kauai in the months ahead. This will be the rock used for the Iraivan plinth, which measures four feet high and 482 feet long. It is the black mountain on which the white gem called Iraivan will sit. We found a place among the tropical plants for him to stockpile 40 large trucks of stone.

Something new was heard at Iraivan site today. Instead of the chink-chink-chink of the silpi’s chisels on the white stone, we heard, for the first time, the kling-kling-kling sound, like that of a bell. The silpi’s are working on the Tara pillars which are made of black stone, not white like the rest of the temple. The sound is so different, all were smiling and we were asked to capture it for you to hear. The first part of this video shows two clips, one of white stone being carved, one of black. See if you can discern the difference.

The black stone is much harder too, so there was extra effort going on as the giant stones were shaped. Plus, the shards which break off are much sharper, almost knife-like, and can cut the arm of the sculptor if he is not cautious. There are four Tara pillars in Iraivan temple, at the center. Each has three ieces, so you will see many blocks in the video. They are deeply fluted, as the video shows toward the end. This kind of sculpting is no longer done in India with granite. It is just too hard to achieve. But as you will see, worth the effort to bring this elegance into the 21st century. Here is our movie of the Tara pillars being carved today.

And a closing reminder today:

The above is just a picture to remind everyone of the updates on our video page