Today we moved the Ganesha and Muruga murtis that were just before the svayambhulingam square, to new locations. The Ganesha moved to the other side of our property to giving blessings outside our new maintenance building, while Muruga moved up to the side of Muruga Hill.
We started in the early morning by transferring the Deity shakti into kumbhas, which then sat in a small yagasala with smaller kalashas in front of the svayambhulingam to receive a full homa. While the homa continued, the murtis were moved to their new locations. Then the large kumbhas and small kalashas were paraded to the new locations and poured over the murtis to re-energize them.
We might post additional photos of these events on another day.

We took taskforcer Tarun Nathoo (in green) over to Himalayan Acres for the first time, to join us in picking hundreds of pounds of noni fruit. Suresh and Rajkumar also joined us. They got to briefly experience the picking platform to reach the higher fruits, while spending most of the time picking the younger trees from the ground.

The second group of photos shows the Ganapati Kulam updating our Guru Puja pilgrims on some of its media activities, including new artwork commissions, videos to show US sixth graders about students visiting the eastern dharmic religions' places of worship, and the Sanskrit pronunciation website we recently created.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva. "A third way that past actions are re-enacted is through the actual intense reactionary experience and working with yourself, conquering inner desires and emotions. When something happens to you that you put into motion in a past life or earlier in this life, sit down and think it over. Do not strike out. Do not react. Work it out inside yourself. Take the experience within, into the pure energies of the spine and transmute that energy back into its primal source. In doing so, what happens? You change its consistency. It no longer has magnetic power, and awareness flows away from that memory pattern forever. You could remember the experience, but your perspective would be totally detached and objective. This is the most common way karma is resolved, in day-to-day experiences. By living an inner life, you stop creating uncomplimentary karma and can therefore consciously face the reactions of the past without the confusion of additional day-to-day reactions."

The monks continue almost daily work on the Siva songs of Saint Tayumanavar. Once in a while we wish we could share them all with you, and we will, once the book is published. In the meantime, here are two from yesterday's editing session.

Canto 40, Song 5
Alone, standing as the astounding pure void, if You call all lives to You and merge them in one inextricable mukti of unending bliss that we call God, will it diminish this play of Your manifold creation?


Song 6
Gathering universes all while losing not a single atom, You put them all into an atom. Gathering atoms all, You made them into universes vast. So mighty are You! Do what You will!

The first photo shows a new platform on the side of Muruga Hill which will soon host the murti of Kartikeya which has been sitting just before the svayambhulingam for so many years.

The other photos reveal that employee Dennis Wong has placed rocks and gravel on most of the section in the bamboo corridor. He is close to reaching the rudraksha grove.

Following the model of another free resource, Wikipedia, today we begin our 13th annual November-December appeal for support of our publications development. The success of this drive defines the scale of our digital work in the months and years ahead.

Right from the days he printed his first yoga lessons by hand in the 1950s on a Mimeograph machine at the San Francisco Temple, Gurudeva readily embraced technological changes. One afternoon in 1984, having never seen or even heard of a Macintosh, he encountered this revolutionary computer in a small Apple store in the sleepy town of Kapaa. After playing with MacPaint and MacWrite for fifteen minutes, he walked out with a Macintosh 128K under his arm. Later, he bought each monk a Mac and gradually made the shift to digital typography. Takes one back to the LaserWriter, right? When the Internet swept up on Kauai's shores in 1997, he urged the monks to publish a daily blog of monastery events, and "Today at Kauai Aadheenam" was born. TAKA, among the earliest of blogs, has been issued almost daily since that time.

Gurudeva would celebrate where we have come today. He would love the ease with which his books are available, at no cost, to everyone who owns a mobile device anywhere in the world. The Capricorn in him would love the lack of massive investment costs that are required for major books to be put on printing presses, tens of thousands of dollars for each title. Then come the inventory costs, the shipping, the returns. All of that has been largely rendered unnecessary in the age of digital publishing. In our case, we are doing both, printed editions of the magazine, for instance, and then digital editions based on the elegantly designed PDF pages. Our Hinduism Today app, available to anyone with a mobile phone, anywhere in the world, is an example of the best of the Web.

Gurudeva would love that we don't have to charge struggling Hindu students and seekers for the spiritual teachings, but can make them available for free. In the last decade, our resource-building efforts have shifted massively toward the Web, following the fast-evolving world of communications and publishing. It takes a deft team to gather and sculpt the needed tools and stories for Hinduism Today and our Web resources. Creating and sharing an articulate and graphically elegant repository of Hinduism is neither easy nor without costs.

Hindu youth are learning their spiritual ABCs online, and millions of seekers are discovering Hinduism digitally. What they encounter should be thoughtful, lucid, elegant and authentic. Not to mention relevant in fast-moving times. That's what compels our annual fundraising campaign. It's a chance for you to help us to help explain and share Hinduism globally. In order to provide information without charging for downloads, without showing advertisements on our sites, without commercializing our mission, we turn to you for help.

Yes, we could (perhaps) meet our costs by charging for the online books and magazine, but we are determined not to do that. We ourselves are seldom motivated to pay for online information. We like it when needed information is available without cost. We have come to expect it. But free to the world is not free to those of us who create it. Running our websites entails significant costs, especially when we have to reach out for expert help and skills. A good example of current use of hired developers to transfer massive amounts of database information from our current Himalayan Academy website to our new one which us under development. The goal for 2023 is the same as last year: $75,000. Our Digital Dharma Drive will end at midnight on December 31, 2023.

We hope you will join in helping us meet our goal. In the right hands, and leveraged by the unsalaried work of the monks, these funds will have a profound impact on the future of Hinduism around the world. Please make a generous donation today.

With much aloha from the far islands and warm greetings during the holiday season,

The Editors
Kauai's Hindu Monastery
Himalayan Academy Publications

On a recent sunny morning, a crew of six or seven masons worked seamlessly together to pour a cement "apron" around three sides of the new Siddhidata Kulam maintenance shop and office/storage building. This will help lessen the amount of dirt and mud tracked into the building

The silpis have been working this last week on a new granite sign for the Siddhidatta Kulam workshop, called Hale Hana, or House of Work in Hawaiian. Check out their skills in turning an illustrator file into permanent granite.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva. "Memory patterns are extremely magnetic. They cause us to have experiences of the type that make us wonder, 'Why should that have ever happened to me? What did I do to attract this? What did I do to cause that? I don’t deserve this happening to me.' The vibrations that cause these experiences were put into effect in this or a past life. Prāṇic forces deep within imprint memory patterns of these actions we put into motion, causing us to face the reactions of them in this life. We face those reactions collectively through other people and through our own action. We are impelled to do certain things. Why? We call it karma. Karma means cause and effect."

Over the years we have released short videos chronicling the all-stone Iraivan Temple’s origins and progress. A longer documentary was created quite some time ago by a well-wisher. Forty-eight years have passed since the late Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami’s initial vision of God Siva to begin the process, and 33 years since the first granite stone block was chiseled in Bengaluru, India. After the soft-opening consecration in March of this year to begin daily pujas in Iraivan Temple, we commissioned videographers to create an updated documentary film of the whole project through that point. Having completed months of coordination and editing of photo, video and audio resources, we are pleased to release the documentary now. Join the Live Premiere! You are cordially invited to a live debut on October 28th at 1pm Hawaii time (HST). Please save this link in your calendar for viewing. It will be made available on here on our youtube channel. In the Meantime... Please enjoy this short trailer!