After flying from Catania, Italy, to Geneva, Switzerland--quite a stark contrast--and spending the night at a little hotel in a small village just across the border in France, our traveling swamis met for breakfast with Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram, a long-time friend of the monastery. As the leader of Project Madurai, he is well-versed in Tamil scripture, language, fonts and such topics, and our publications team has benefitted from his expertise for at least two decades. It was a boon to finally meet him.

The conversation was lively. He then took us to see the Sri Arputa Vinayakar Temple in the nearby suburb of Versoix, on Lake Geneva. The temple was unfortunately closed, as it was a weekday, but we enjoyed seeing it in its beautiful country surroundings.

Our next meeting in Switzerland was in Bern, but not until the afternoon. Thus, we took the opportunity to drive the long route, up into the Alps. It was quite cool, cloudy and raining on and off, but beautiful nonetheless. A welcome respite, in fact, to the sweltering summer heat blanketing all our other stops.

Arriving at the University of Bern, we met Dr. Frank Neubert, a scholar who has been studying with great interest Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, Saiva Siddhanta Church and Hinduism Today magazine. We rarely meet a Western scholar who is so fond of Gurudeva, of the monks and our work. He shared links to a paper he has written on Hinduism Today for a European journal and an article he has written on Gurudeva and Saiva Siddhanta Church for the Encyclopedia of Hinduism.

Next to drive through the countryside of one of the world's most pristine nations. We halted at a traditional Swiss country inn where we would spend the night. A 45-minute drive from Bern nearly doubled in length because it was raining cats and dogs. Fortunately, at this time of year here it doesn't begin to get dark until around 10:00pm, so we were spared having to do that in the dark. And fortunately Swiss drivers are quite accustomed to driving in adverse conditions, so everything went quite smoothly.

Our final visit that day was to the Sri Manonmani Ampal Alayam. This temple, built by immigrants from Sri Lanka just in the last few years and inaugurated only six weeks back, is a remarkable feat for the community here. It is the newest and largest traditional temple in Switzerland, and quite a powerful one, despite being so new. Little did we know that the cool, wet night we visited was the final night in a ten-day residual festival following the kumbhabhishekam.

Afte aratis to all the Deities, the primary and final offerings were made to Sri Bhairava. Many wonderful connections were made here, and we were able to breakfast with the temple's manager, Ramalingam, the following morning, while learning the story of this substantial immigrant community that came as refugees in the 1980s and 90s.

The next morning, getting off to a fresh start, graced again by sunny skies, we traversed the remaining quarter of this unbelievably gorgeous little nation on the way to Winterthur, a prominent suburb of Zurich. Here lies the Omkarananda Ashram and Divine Light Center, started in 1966 when the young Swami Omkarananda was brought to Switzerland by a wealthy devotee.

Hardly noticeable on an unassuming residential street, this seasoned ashram sprawls across ten buildings, housing about 25 monks and nuns, in addition to occasional guests like ourselves, an elaborate multi-level indoor temple to a veritable plethora of Gods, a lecture hall, libraries and reading rooms, publishing facilites, and on and on. The temple was the most precious element, of course.

The monks and nuns here joyously adhere to a rigorous discipline of daily pujas at all the shrines, including a Shanti homa that was once perpetual, 24 hours a day, but is now tended during the day as staff permits. They do pujas from morning to night, and invited us to the 90-minute late morning puja. Spontaneously while worshiping in the temple in the afternoon, we were invited to install three small murtis--Sri Venkateswara and His consorts--that Madhu Shastri had brought from London.

The Omkarananda Ashram was the site of our primary interview to find out about Hinduism in Switzerland. To our great surprise and delight, the Omkarananda monks had invited Satish Joshi, a long-time resident of the neutral nation and a bottomless well of knowledge about just what we came to find out--and an astonishingly articulate one at that. He was able to tell us every answer to our questions, before we even posed them. And he spoke with such clarity, we think we can just print his tale as told.

There is a powerful presence of the founder here, Swami Omkarananda, and his work, we found, is in overly competent hands.

The story of Hindus in this country was more nuanced than we had imagined, something that we were discovering more and more in every country. Also offering insights this evening were Satish Sharma, director of the Hindu Temples Association in the UK (he wants to print Hinduism Today in the UK!), our old-time friend Madhu Shastri, Swamis Vivekananda and Vishnudevananda of the ashram, and Shivani, a local yoga teacher, bharatanatyam dancer and devotee of the ashram. It was an interesting mix, leaving us with a thorough look at our religion here.

Among the delightful, disciplined monks was Vishnudevananda, who discovered Gurudeva's books some eight years back and has read every word of every book, and every issue of Hinduism Today. A scholar and student of Indian spirituality, he knew more about our works than many of us do.

This is the Soni family from Dallas, Texas. They last visited here seven years ago, and have helped host Satguru's visits to Dallas.

As many of you know who have been here recently, the large banyan tree on the east side of Kadavul had grown to gigantic proportions and was beginning to engulf our buildings as well as shade the sun from the solar array. We hired a local arborist, Felipe, to trim the tree. It was a radical pruning of the understory. Felipe took a special interest in the project, pledging to make it "beautiful." After removing a 85 percent of the lower branches and leaving the crown, we can see the structure of the main trunks. It looks like a magnificent sculpture. Underneath the tree we gained a 1/4 acre of re-estate. The Siddhidata Kulam is turning this into a temple flower garden.

The fourth and final part of the story about our two swamis' visit to the Svami Gitananda Ashram in Altare, Savona, Italy:

A number of years ago, the Italian monastery brought a team of sthapatis and shilpis from Tamil Nadu to build an Agamic Chola-style temple to Sri Lalita Tripurasundari, the main Deity that is worshiped according to the Sri Vidya tradition. Built of concrete and plaster, the temple captures the South Indian tradition in brightly painted splendor, just as our Iraivan Temple does in unadorned stone in Hawaii. Since the area receives one to three meters of snow in the winter, when the monks sometimes have to tunnel through it, igloo-style, to get from building to building, this temple is fully enclosed and amply heated.

The temple here, as in Kauai, is the central focus of worship and sadhana. From morning to night the temple is visited, pujas performed, offerings of fragrant flowers made, musical praises ascended, quiet discovered. And like Kadavul Temple, it is the monks who do it all. Swamiji performs the noon puja himself, and all are present for this central daily moment.

The large stone Sivalingam was the first murti to be installed here back in the 1980s. Ultimately Devi was enshrined and the Sivalingam was placed in a temporary shrine near the entrance. There is now a plan to build a separate temple for Siva, about twice the size, parallel to this temple, literally just a few meters away and slightly up the hill, where the vegetable garden is now located. In the years ahead, there will be paired temples for Siva and Shakti, side by side. The immanent and the transcendent as one.

The monks invited us to join their sadhana one evening after dinner. This consisted of a full puja followed by Ganesha Gayatri mantra japa, bhajans led with amazing vigor by Svamini Ma Uma Shakti
and then, importantly, group chanting of the Sri Lalita Sahasranama.

This sacred hymn has become a central focus and meditation for the monastery. It began some years back when the press of challenges inspired the community to seek Devi's blessings by gathering together to chant the famed sacred mantra twice each day. When those challenges dissolved (it worked!), they were thinking to suspend the daily prayer.  Swamiji offered that they should continue, since devotees don't just go to the Divine when we need help, but always, in good times and bad.

This was not a trivial direction from the guru. The chant is long, taking nearly an hour to offer to Sri Lalita, Siva's Sakti. Not only that, each of the 1,008 names is not just a couple of words, as in most sahasranamas, but a full two-line stotra, making the chanting of the Lalita Sahasranama equivalent of chanting a normal ashtottara twenty times. Do that morning and night and you will understand the commitment the monks have made to their worship.

The stotras are deeply mystical, speaking of the five powers--creation, preservation, dissolution, veiling and revealing grace and unraveling in their devotional poetry the mysteries of existence. We have seldom before heard such precisely accurate, powerful chanting in a group, any group. The Sanskrit-trained Svamini Atmananda, 30, leads the monks in this sadhana twice times each day--yes, every day--in the early
morning and again at night. As we sat in this holy chamber, filled with the divine imagery of the Southern tradition, we were frozen in the now by the practiced cadence, which, coupled with the tangible bhakti, did what such things are supposed to do, transported us to the Holy Feet. The stotras swept by and then through us, an offering so pure, so full of piety, gratitude, graceful skill.

Never before had we quite cognized the significance and power of this mantra. In the Sri Lalita Sahasranama, important to Saiva Siddhanta's sister tradition of Sri Vidya, is described the manifestation of reality out of Parasiva and Parashakti, from subtle to gross, through the tattvas and in the kalas of the cosmos. Siva manifesting as all form, in all form, just as was presented in a complex diagram we published in the article "The Five Powers of Siva" in a recent edition of Hinduism Today.

So powerful and mystical is the chanting of the mantra by this dedicated group that it seemed an eternity of silence followed as we all merged in Sakti's Infinite Being afterwards. After one or two forevers passed, we all arose to circumambulate the garbhagriham in a reverential hush and then walked outside into the cool, starry, almost-midnight night, the high "eee" sound ringing powerfully in the mind's inner chambers as we drifted back to our rooms for a much-needed, good night's sleep before our flight to Sicily.

For decades we have visited the Gitananda Ashram in Pondicherry, meeting Swami Gitananda, the founder and his amazing family. His work is alive here, kept vibrant by Svami Yogananda Giri in its full and pristine form. Any Hindu traveling in Italy will be blessed to visit the Svami Gitananda Ashram, and doubly blessed to meet the good souls who have given their life to build this spiritual citadel. 

Aum Namasivaya! Sivayanama Aum!

After years of carving in Bangalore and months of complicated shipping proccedures, Hanuman has finally reached the monastery. The team at Aloha Isle Moving company are the ones who helped unload Hanuman and all other stones from the shipping containers. We're grateful to them for always putting our stone arrival on the highest priority, and with the most experienced staff and operators to handle all the delicate pieces. Hanuman particularly challenged them due to his weight and length. To date they have delivered about 70 containers of stones!

The Media Studio's new entryway is progressing nicely. The rafters have been installed after months of detailed work. They all fit wonderfully.

A new phase begins today. This morning a homa was conducted in Kaduval temple. Those in attendance wrote notes and prayers for the devas to be burned in the sacred fire. Bodhinatha gave a short talk afterwards, expressing the significance and power of our daily sadhana, no matter how simple it may be. He explained the importance for youth to develop a habit of daily sadhana, even if it is just 10 minutes a day.

On the second evening at the Svami Gitananda Ashram in Italy, Svami Yogananda Giri gathered all the mathavasis together to meet with us in a hall. He invited Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami to give a talk to them all. It was clear that this was a rare event in their life and each one was yogicly attentive.

Paramacharya spoke about the centrality of paramparai and the paramount importance of the guru-shishya relationship. He offered that the monks here are blessed to live a traditional life with a remarkable guru, then added that Swamiji is also blessed, for it is not easy to gather together such dedicated and competent monks. Swamiji laughed heartily. Details of our Kauai monastery and mission were briefly mentioned at Swamiji's request and then Paramacharya addressed the younger monks, all seated on the left. He spoke of the importance of a life without conflict and conveyed the message that Gurudeva would always tell another monastic order when invited to speak to them: "Obey your guru… Obey your guru… Obey your guru."

He also shared about how we maintain harmony in our monastery through such practices as settling all disagreements before sleep, something Gurudeva mandated that we follow strictly, and which works very well for us. Harmony isn't a given, even in a monastery. Our monks--and theirs--are intelligent, strong-minded people, and sometimes naturally we bump up against each other a bit and hurt feelings are caused.

It is through living together in a community, as a spiritual brotherhood, that our karmas come up to be resolved. And if we don't resolve them, we're not doing our job as monks. Gurudeva asserted that spiritual work cannot be done when there is conflict in the air. And unresolved experiences go into the subconscious mind only to fester and result in greater problems later on. Thus, harmony has to be worked at to be maintained. the young ones smiles and quick glances to each other told of their knowing.

Svamiji clearly liked the topic (not one any other visitor would dare explore) and even though it was made clear that we were not suggesting that they follow our model, the look in Svamiji's eyes told that he was seriously thinking about what was said!

At the end, to our surprise, Svamiji approached with shawls and gifts for the traveling swamis. We gifted him with a special Rudraksha mala made by the Wailua Mission (ten were made and have been our gift of choice throughout).

The parallels between our two orders, even with the monks being almost all female (17 out of 20) at the Italian monastery and all male at the Kauai monastery, are remarkable. They work through their publications to educate Italians and Italian Hindus about Hinduism, to dispel myths and misinformation. They divide up the work at the monastery so that not any one person is responsible for too many areas, just like us; they have a grounds group, a publications group, an administration group, a temple group.

They also work with the Italian government through the Italian Hindu Union that they helped found, in order to advocate for proper recognition and treatment of Hindus in this old, conservative country inside of which the Vatican is located. Just this year they accomplished something enormous: full recognition of Hinduism as a religion. Thus, starting next year when the new law goes into effect, Hindu marriages will be recognized in Italy, along with all the customary benefits typically afforded an officially recognized religion. This achievement is enormous and will transform the lives of every Hindu in Italy in the years ahead. 

We hope you're enjoying reading about this unusually parallel group of Western-born monks as much as we enjoyed visiting with them. More tomorrow of their temple sadhanas.