Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami was the founder of Saiva Siddhanta Church and Kauai’s Hindu Monastery. He was ordained Sivaya Subramuniyaswami by Satguru Siva Yogaswami on the full-moon day of May 12, 1949, in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, at 6:21 pm. This was just days after he had attained nirvikalpa samadhi in the caves of Jalani. Yogaswami, then 77, ordained the 22-year old yogi with a tremendous slap on the back, saying, “This will be heard in America,” and conferring upon him the mission to bring the fullness of Saivism to the West. That same year, while still in Sri Lanka, Subramuniyaswami founded the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order and Saiva Siddhanta Church at the Sri Subramuniya Ashram in Alaveddy. Returning to America, he spent the next six years preparing for his teaching mission through intense sadhana and tapas. He began actively teaching in 1957 when he founded the Himalayan Academy. In 1970, he established his international headquarters and monastery complex, Kauai Aadheenam, on Hawaii’s Garden Island of Kauai. Five years later, he designated a portion of the 51-acre holy site as the San Marga Sanctuary, site of the almost complete Iraivan Temple, carved of white granite stone in Bangalore, India, and manifesting in Kauai. To spearhead a growing Hindu renaissance, he founded the international newspaper HINDUISM TODAY in 1979. Now read in several countries, the journal has become known worldwide as the Hindu family newspaper. Over the years Subramuniyaswami wrote hundreds of tracts and books, which have been distributed in the tens of thousands in many languages. Gurudeva taught us the traditional Saivite Hindu path to enlightenment, a path that leads the soul from simple service to worshipful devotion to God, from the disciplines of meditation and yoga to the direct knowing of Divinity within. §