Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami and Senthilnathaswami spent the weekend at the San Antonio Hindu Temple's 22nd anniversary festival. The temple, built in 1989, has been closely connected to Gurudeva from the beginning. The temple, with a facility covering several acres, sits at the top of a hill in Helotes, outside San Antonio. It is a beautiful, serene spot, perfect for a Venkateswara temple.

Bodhinatha's talk on Friday evening was on "The Spiritual Perspective of Work."

A few dozen people were in attendance.

Kailash Dhaksinamurthi from Boston flew out to be with Bodhinatha for the weekend and hear his talks.

In addition to the main Balaji shrine and the attending Ganesha, Sri Devi and Bhu Devi shrines, there is a Saiva shrine with Lingam, Bhavani Devi and Shanmukha. All the Deities are black granite. Just before Bodhinatha's talk on "The Basis of Temple Worship" on Saturday morning, the priests, who are from Tirupati, performed beautiful abhishekam to all three of the Saiva Deities. In honor of Bodhinatha's attendance, the priests were inspired to adorn the Lingam with rudraksha alankaram for the first time.

After the talk was the maha mangala arati. Then Bodhinatha and the temple trustees officially released the souvenir for the event.

Saturday afternoon Bodhinatha was asked to give a short presentation and lead a discussion about endowments for the temple trustees and other concerned devotees. Being the architect of our very own Hindu Heritage Endowment, with 83 funds benefiting worthy Hindu causes all over the world, Bodhinatha was adept at clarifying what exactly an endowment is, how to raise funds for an endowment, the importance of delegating the investment of the funds to professional investment counsel, the necessity to solicit planned gifts and other topics. The group was pleasantly shocked at Bodhinatha's expertise in this area. They asked lots of questions and gained great clarity for how to run their own foundation that they recently started to take care of the Hindu Temple of San Antonio.

Sunday morning we were the honored guests at the country estate of Drs. Rama Krishna and Kamala Rao. They are two of the founding members of the temple here in San Antonio.

The Raos have a small temple in their compound called the Mother Temple. It was here that the Deities for the San Antonio temple were housed and worshiped from 1984 to 1989 until the temple was built at the top of a nearby hill. Rama Krishna has generously donated Ganesha murtis and other murtis for Bodhinatha to give to temple groups starting up around the US and Canada. This Ganapati is for a group that hopes to create a temple in Honolulu. Bodhinatha ceremonially received the murti and performed abhishekam to it.

The talk at the temple on Sunday morning was on "Prayer and Meditation" and was attended by many more devotees, including many youth.

Bodhinatha took the opportunity to show off our new Hindu Children's Modern Stories books, proudly announcing that the ebook editions are available now on the Amazon Kindle Store and the Apple iBookstore, months prior to the print editions becoming available for sale in the US.

After the talk, many people lined up to speak with Bodhinatha and get his advice. This young man was born in India and moved to the US when he was 2. He considers himself completely an American. He asked one of Bodhinatha's favorite questions: "If I have a Ganesha in my room at home, why should I ever come to the temple to worship?"

The priests asked everyone to sit for the final archana and maha mangala arati on Sunday. It was a poignantly devotional affair, with beautiful, powerful, lyrical chanting. As you can see, like in Tirupati, the Balaji murti here is larger than life.

Our new brahmachari, Mayuran Sokkan, drove down from Killeen to be with Bodhinatha for the weekend. He had a wonderful, devotional time. Mayuran is on his way to Kauai to become a monk in our monastery. Once the temple board members got wind of this, a few of them took him under their wing and made sure he was blessed at all of the homas and pujas. One gave him a beautiful veshti and shawl and showered him with good advice. Mayuran will arrive at Kauai Aadheenam on April 10, a day before Bodhinatha and Senthilnathaswami return from their Texas-Louisiana-Arizona yatra. We look forward to welcoming you home, Brahmachariji!

A visit to San Antonio is never complete without darshan with Dr. Pemmaraju Narasimha Rao and his wife Suvarna Rani, founding members of the temple here and ongoing senior advisors to the temple board of trustees. They regaled us with wonderful stories about Gurudeva's visits to San Antonio in the 80s and 90s, especially one when Gurudeva's outbound flight was delayed and he invited them to have an impromptu satsang over coffee for an hour in the airport until his flight departed. Jai Gurudeva! Jai to the Lone Star State, a haven to Hindus in the 21st century.

We are happy to announce the publication of two new books for young people and for the young at heart. Ten Tales About Self-Control brings us Ten stories base on the Yamas; and Ten Tales About Religious Life stories are based on the Niyamas. They are a manifestation of Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami’s continuing drive to bring core Hindu basics to the next generation in ways that can be absorbed by the 21st century Hindu generations.

A major innovation for Himalayan Academy Publications, these books are being released first as eBooks and include audio! The audio is only available in iPhone or iPad which has the advanced HTML5 Audio an video playing capabilities within iBooks. Later we will be offering the option to read and listen directly in your web browser.

The ability to move forward with digital delivery has been a result of last year’s generous funding via our Digital Dharma Drive. Stay tuned for more exciting offerings in the months ahead and download your copies of the new books here:

Free eBooks

We are proud to announce that Hinduism Today and our Minimela.com web sites placed first in their categories in the Reader’s Choice Awards recently held by About.com Hinduism.

And this web site, Himalayan Academy.com placed second in the top five Hindu Orgs category. Click to check it out

Kauai Aadheenam's interest in the Saiva Agamas dates back decades to Gurudeva's insistence that they be identified and made available for study and use. These ancient texts are the key scriptures defining the Saiva denomination of Hinduism. The Agamas are the authoritative texts on temple construction and worship. But they contain much more, from cosmology to the intricacies of the guru-disciple relationship, to initiations and instructions for meditations on the nature of Lord Siva. This knowledge has remained mostly inaccessible, hidden within thousands of palm leaf manuscripts scattered throughout India.

Once state-of-the-art technology, the palm leaf manuscripts were painstakingly recopied every hundred years or so to preserve them. But this process stopped in the 19th century. Well cared for, palm-leaf manuscripts last for hundreds of years, but if neglected they can be destroyed by nature within a short time. Fortunately, in the 1950s and 60s, Jean Filliozat and Pandit N.R. Bhatt of the French Institute of Pondicherry set out to collect and preserve these manuscripts, with a focus on the Saiva Agamas. The result of their work is the 8,000+ bundles now preserved at the Institute.

Early efforts to copy and thus preserve the manuscripts were thwarted by the cost and complexity of microfilm. It is only recently, with the advent of high resolution digital cameras, that efficient and economical methods became available.

(Photos above, bottom to top) Two heavily damaged leaves; a pair of typical leaves from the bundle of Sukshma Agama; side view of the Sukshma Agama; and top view of wrapped Sukshma Agama bundle.

(Photo left) Acharya Arumuganathaswami sets up the team in December, 2008, as Dr. S. Sabharathanam, expert on Saiva Agamas, looks on.

In 2005 Bodhinatha approached the French Institute with a proposal to digitize the Saiva-related bundles–about half the collection. But once he saw the precarious condition of the rare manuscripts, which could easily have been destroyed completely by fire, tsunami or other natural disaster, he offered to digitize and thus protect the entire collection.

The Institute is owned by the French Government, and getting permission to digitize the collection was a slow process. Experts in ancient manuscripts and photography were consulted, and a simple system using Nikon cameras tethered to Macintosh computers was set up at the Institute. Starting in December 2008, four young men were hired to do the work and process the photos. They took 2,000 photos daily and completed the collection (save 200 heavily damaged bundles) on January 1, 2011. Altogether, they took 775,261 photographs. These have been assembled into PDF files, one for each bundle, and will soon be available for download on the Institute's website. This is possibly the first of India's ancient manuscript collections to be entirely digitized.

Until now, anyone wishing to view a bundle had to go to Pondicherry and physically inspect it. If he wanted a copy, he had to make it by hand, perhaps damaging the brittle leaves in the process. Such obstacles impeded the study of the Agamas, and only a few have been put into print (most in Sanskrit, with no translation). Now, further deterioration is no longer an issue and anyone in the world can download a manuscript in minutes.

The Aadheenam's long-term plan is to create a collection of excerpts from the Saiva Agamas, translated into English, on key concepts of Saiva Siddhanta, such as the inner meaning of temple worship and the function of the guru. Now, only succinct summaries of Vedanta philosophy, such as from the Upanishads, exist in many languages. The scriptural basis of other aspects of Hinduism, as found in the Agamas, should be equally available.

Hundreds of millions will worship Lord Siva tonight, many will fast and observe silence, many will gather to worship the Sivalingam in temples and ashrams, homes and forest retreats. Tonight we will fall at His feet in love and reverence, then soar within to His central Being, our being, your being. We honor this night with our dear Gurudeva's description of God Siva, lilting and lucid:

Truly, God Siva is everywhere. He is the energy within our mind manifesting thought. He is the thought thus made manifest. He is the light within your eyes and the feel within your fingers. God Siva is the ignorance which makes the One seem as two. He is the karma, which is the law of cause and effect, and He is the maya, which is the substance of evolution in which we become so deeply immersed that we look upon the outside world as more real than God. God Siva is all this and more. He is the Sun, the Earth and the spaces between. He is the revealed scriptures and those who have scribed the scriptures. He is all who seek the wisdom of scripture, too.

Siva dances in every atom throughout this universe. Siva dances energetically, ceaselessly, eternally. Siva is perpetual movement. His mind is all-pervasive, and thus He sees and knows everything in all spheres simultaneously and without effort. Siva is the Self, and He is the energy we put forth to know the Self. He is the mystery which makes us see Him as separate from us. He is the energy of life, the power in the wind. He is the dissolution called death, the peace of motionless air. He is the great force of the ocean and the stillness on a calm lake. Siva is All and in all.

Our great God Siva is beyond time, beyond space, beyond form and form's creation, and yet He uses time and causes form. He is in the sky, in the clouds, in the swirling galaxies. Siva's cosmic dance of creation, preservation and dissolution is happening this very moment in every atom of the cosmos. Supreme God Siva is immanent, with a beautiful human-like form which can actually be seen and has been seen by many mystics in visions. Siva is also transcendent, beyond time, cause and space. Such are the mysteries of Siva's being. Read the holy scriptures and contemplate their description of our great God Siva. They explain who Siva is. They tell us that Siva has three perfections: Parashiva, Satchidananda and Maheshvara. As Parashiva, He is the Self, beyond time, form and space.

As Satchidananda, He is all-pervasive love, light and consciousness flowing through every atom of existence. As Maheshvara, He is the Primal Soul, the Supreme Being who creates, preserves and destroys what we term existence. They tell us that our Supreme Being has a body of light and a mind and will that reigns over His creations. They tell us that Supreme God Siva created our individual soul, which is a body of light in which His uncreated mind resides. Lord Siva's mind is called Satchidananda. It is the all-pervasive, inner state of mind inherent in every person on this Earth, but to be realized to be known.

Today the Ganapati Kulam gave their news. The team is focused on several fronts. The Guru Parampara book is moving ahead. The first draft was issued internally and has been read Bodhinatha and a few of the other monk for input. Artwork is being processed.

Our Hinduism Today April issue arrived from the press and it was impressive! The digital edition and online update for the quarterly release will be coming in a day or so.

In the background we are working on a major upgrade to this very Himalayan Academy.com web site. It started in the very early days of the internet, with our first pages going on line as far back as 1995. There was a subsequent minor upgrade about 1998 when TAKA came on line. Then we did a major overhaul of the design in 2004.
We’ve learn a lot in those years and the new web site will be quite advanced with navigation on steroids to provide users better access to our content. We are also planning to open up the design to allow for more full screen width photos and movies.

Once we reach our first goal of having all our existing media assets easily accessible, then we will move forward with some new innovations. This new initiative is made possible thanks to the contributions made by everyone to the Digital Dharma Drive.

While the Himalayan Academy web site talks to the whole world, a separate initiative is also underway to build a complete social networking and collaboration site for Saiva Siddhanta Church members.

Stay tuned for big digital things to come.

During the last innersearch we had classes with Aarti and Mayuresh on the Yamas and Niyamas. Sivakatirswami asked Aarti and Mayuresh to help design some games. We started with “memory cards”.

There are 40 cards, 20 for the Yamas and 20 for the Niyamas. For each Yama and Niyama there is a Title card and a Meaning card, that match. It’s been some time in development and we finally got to producing a prototype which we printed and played together today.

This was an important meeting, without these two high class game designers and consultants we would be lost!

Aarti and Mayuresh also created three additional games using the cards: Go Fish-Yama! and “My Yama Niyama Life” (You draw a card and then you share some personal experience related to that yama or Niyama) and also “Make a Story” (You draw a card and then you create a story related to that card and then next person draws card, repeats the story from the first person and adds and additional piece to the story, but related to the card he drew.)

One mission critical change was made by our team today: orientation of the cards needs to be vertical in order to encompass the game play for more than just the Memory Game.

Aarti and Mayuresh also participated in the development of the two new books. On Skype they read aloud to Arumugaswami all the twenty stories and commented on the vocabulary and concepts. This was an important contribution. Today they get to see the final product.

Stay tuned for more Yama and Niyama fun in the future.

The Ebook versions will soon be available and they include audio readings of the stories.

Today in Midland, Texas, pre-release ebook versions of our upcoming storybooks on the yamas and niyamas, "Ten Tales About Self-Control" and "Ten Tales About Religious Life," were tested on an iPad at a Bal Vikas class at the Hindu Association of West Texas. The books, which will be released in print later this year, are geared toward the 10-to-12 age group. Each of these two books in our new Modern Hindu Children's Stories series has ten stories, one for each yama (ethical restraint) and niyama (religious observance), respectively. The ebook versions, which have just been completed, will be released soon on Apple iBookstore (for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch), Amazon (for their Kindle e-reader) and Barnes and Noble (for their Nook e-reader). This will be the first time that the monastery will release digital versions of a publication prior to the printed edition.

At the request of Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami, the stories were written by Anuradha Murali of Karnataka and illustrated by Rajeev N.T. of Kerala and then carefully edited by the swamis of Kauai's Hindu Monastery over the last couple of years. Book 1, "Ten Tales About Self-Control," includes stories such as "How Our Family Became Vegetarians Again," "Caught In a Friend's Lie," "How a Puppy Taught Chandran Patience" and "Honesty: the Best Policy." Book 2, "Ten Tales About Religious Life," includes stories such as "Be Satisfied with What You Have," "The Milk Miracle," "Treating Guests as God" and "Penance at a Cave in Malaysia."

A special feature of the ebook edition for Apple's iOS devices is the inclusion of the audiobook version of each story. The monastery hired a professional voice actress in Florida to record the stories, and devotees assisted with training her in how to pronounce the Hindu names and terms throughout the books. A link to listen to a story is included right on the first page of that story. While a child listens, she can read along or just look at the beautiful illustrations. The printed books, now being printed in Kuala Lumpur, each include an MP3 CD with the recordings. The books will also be released as standalone audiobooks.

Thanks go to Dr. Padmaja Patel (standing second from right), who has been using the monastery's teaching materials in her Bal Vikas for a few years and had the idea recently to try using an iPad in her classes, an idea that has been working out really well. She shared about the new ebooks on the iPad, "I noticed that the kids were very engrossed in the story because of the audio which kept their attention. They indicated that they would like to read other stories during our next session. Comments we gathered from them included: interesting, good pictures, easy to understand, would like to read other stories next time. They liked the fact that they can read them on their iPad and the stories seemed real to them." Stay tuned for excerpts, including audio, and information about how to acquire these exciting new books!

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