What's a "Brahmanical sense"?

[Guest guest]

And what is this about Hinduism being "a matter of birth and inheritance, not of

spirituality"?

 

Nice article, except for one paragraph, which was really completely unnecessary.

What I find rather interesting is why Western journalists feel the need to

throw in something negative to "balance" an article about Hinduism. This is a

typical knee-jerk reaction. It appears that something negative has to be said

about Hindus or Hindu practices else the article might lack credibility among

readers. Articles about other religions don't suffer from this syndrome.

Here's the completely unnecessary (in my opinion) para:

 

"Some critics question the temple's religious significance, saying Hinduism is a

matter of birth and inheritance, not of spirituality. Saiva Siddhanta's founding

guru and most of the monastery's monks are Westerners who adopted Hinduism.

"It's sort of white people's Hinduism," said Lee Siegel, a professor of Indian

religions at the University of Hawaii. "It doesn't say much about India or

India and the Diaspora. It says something about people of my generation, George

Harrison Hindus. Most Indians that I ask about the Hindu temple on Kauai say

it's very nice. But in a real Brahminical sense, I don't think it can be taken

seriously."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/national/07religion.html

 

For Temple, 1,600 Tons, 8,000 Miles and 1,000 YearsBy MICHELE KAYALPublished: February 7, 2004

WAILUA, Kauai - The barefoot man from Bangalore, India, wedged a woolly coconut

husk underneath a 400-pound block of stone and began rocking it into place,

chanting "aisha, aisha" to keep his rhythm with each little shove.

His workmates marked the stone using a sliver of bamboo daubed with red oxide,

checked their line with a builder's square and a piece of string, and turned it

back to the stone mover, who gave it two strategic taps with a hammer and a

rough iron chisel before cleaving away the excess with a single decisive blow.

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This looks like India, but it is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where members of

the Saiva Siddhanta Church are erecting a white granite temple to the Hindu god

Siva that fulfills the vision of their guru and is intended to last 1,000 years.

For this act of devotion, every single piece of stone - 1,600 tons in all - is

being pulled from the earth by hand in India and carved into intricately

detailed blocks using nothing but hammer and iron chisel.

The pieces are then shipped 8,000 miles to the church's headquarters on Kauai,

where six Indian stonemasons, called silpis (pronounced SHIL-pees), and their

supervising architect fit them together like mystical Lincoln Logs.

When it is finished, the temple will measure roughly 90 by 150 feet and will

stand 36 feet high from its foundation to the top of its gold-leafed capstone.

"The monks thought it was a really wild idea to have a temple of this size,"

Sadhaka Haranandinatha, one of 21 monks in the monastery that serves as the

church's headquarters and also head of the temple fund-raising project, said

about the guru's idea for the temple. "But we took it as a directive from

Siva."

Carving began in India in 1990, and construction is expected to continue through

at least 2010. The temple is being financed solely by donations, church

officials said, with $6 million of the total $16 million required already

raised from 8,000 people in 55 countries. For every dollar put toward

construction, a dollar goes into a maintenance endowment.

The partly finished San Marga Iraivan Temple sparkles like a diamond against the

lush green backdrop of Mount Waialeale, presiding over a bend in the Wailua

River.

On a recent day, the silpis were assembling one of the final courses, or layers,

of the temple's great dome. The seven-ton capstone is scheduled to be raised in

mid-April, finishing off the inner sanctum where the monks will place their

most sacred object: a 700-pound naturally formed crystal that stands three feet

tall and is interpreted as a mark of Lord Siva.

Then the artisans - 70 of them in a village outside Bangalore - will focus on

the temple's hall and the fantastic feats of carving the monks call the

wonderments: lions cradling balls in their mouths that can be rolled but not

removed; rare musical pillars that will play tones when struck; a bell and

chain with moveable links.

"These are mystical codings to make a connection to the celestial world," said

Sadhaka Jothinatha, a monk, who explained that every detail - lion faces, the

small men carved into the temple's base, and its proportionality, all based on

a measurement of 11 feet, 7¼ inches that is derived from the guru's astrology -

are messages to the gods. Hundreds of temples serve the more than one million

Hindus estimated to live in the United States today. But the San Marga Iraivan

Temple may be one of the most elaborate.

Indian communities often bring artisans and priests from India to work with

local contractors and have ritually important architectural elements carved in

India, said Phillip B. Wagoner, an art history professor at Wesleyan

University.

Kauai's Saiva Siddhanta Church, an organization within Hinduism's Saiva

denomination of Siva worshipers, is not the product of a transported Indian

community, but of a California-born guru, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, who

founded his monastery here in 1970. Five years later, the guru, who has since

died, reported having a vision of Siva sitting on a rock on the monastery

grounds, and decided to enshrine the vision's spiritual power with a grand

millennium temple.

Some mystics and architects say that dynamite and machines destroy stone's

ability to channel spiritual vibrations, so they were forbidden in the harvest

and carving of the stone. Church officials said the guru also hoped that hand

methods would help preserve what was then the dying art of stonecutting.

Some critics question the temple's religious significance, saying Hinduism is a

matter of birth and inheritance, not of spirituality. Saiva Siddhanta's

founding guru and most of the monastery's monks are Westerners who adopted

Hinduism. "It's sort of white people's Hinduism," said Lee Siegel, a professor

of Indian religions at the University of Hawaii. "It doesn't say much about

India or India and the Diaspora. It says something about people of my

generation, George Harrison Hindus. Most Indians that I ask about the Hindu

temple on Kauai say it's very nice. But in a real Brahminical sense, I don't

think it can be taken seriously."

But the stone carvers, most of whom are Hindus, and the Hindus who make up about

two-thirds of what church officials estimate at 5,000 visitors a year, do not

seem to mind.

"We consider this a holy place," said Say Nagarajah, a young man of Sri Lankan

origin who came from Sydney with his wife and stopped by to look at the

building and worship at a small existing temple that is part of the monastery.

E-mail Address(es): letters (AT) nytimes (DOT) com

 

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