Bodhinatha and Shanmuganathaswami are in Bali for a few days. Bali is a wonderful source for items we use in our Minimela and the only way to make arrangements is to go there and deal with vendors directly. It also gives Bodhinatha a break from his intense travel schedule and a chance to rest and have darshan in Bali’s unique temples.

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END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of our phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming two-day retreat,
until Dvitiya Tithi, Sun One, Thursday, June 2nd.

This past phase we have been compiling scans of paper manuscripts of old Saiva writings. These are turned into PDF’s for easy viewing. When the priest in Tamil Nadu, Professor Bhatt, set out to rescue scriptures held by the priests families, in many cases the families did not want to give up their collection, so arrangements were made to copy the original palm leaf and other manuscripts that were in the Granth script and transpose them into Devanagari.

This heritage included many Saiva Agamas and other very interesting and useful texts.

This text was written centuries ago by a Sivachariya priest who was also the Mathadhipati of an Aadheenam in Tamil Nadu.

As we proceed with developments in the background on the future of our new web site make over, we will release little “tidbits” when we can.

One major upgrade will be to put modern slideshow technology to work that (for the nerds among you) does not use Flash, and which has a very simple content management system that will allow us to create slide show efficiently with little task over head and also be able repurpose easily in the future.

Here is an example of taking content from the past and making it evergreen and accessible going forward, as many of these slideshows are teachings in themselves. Enjoy now, here-to-fore “rahasya” (secret) images inside the sanctum of Kadavul. Click the image to enlarge to full screen. And move you mouse up and down or left to right to pan the images.
(May not work in IE7-8; use Firefox, Safari or Chrome or Opera)

Maha Sivaratri, 2010

As part of Brahmachari Mayuran’s training he is taking photos and learning all about photo processing.

Click here for a slide show of his recent photo shoot. Uses the new technology and higher resolution images.

It has come to the attention of the animal kingdom that more people are eating meat in China and are even trying to buy land in Brasil and other countries to raise soybeans and corn to feed all the chickens and pigs they plan to raise back in China.

Hinduism Today was contacted by the International Porcine Society. Their Vice President pictured here, a dynamic young organizer and forthright spokesman for the species, asked that we inform homo sapiens how they feel about this new trend.

He reminded us that in South India, “Saiva” is synonymous with Vegetarian.