A Message from Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami

November 1, 2011

To good souls using our websites, described as “where Hinduism meets the future:”

To keep our free web resources online, during the final quarter of 2010 we reached out for assistance from all of you around the world who value the spiritual and educational content on our sites. We followed the Wikipedia model, a world-class, free-resources site that raises funds once a year to keep their good work going. The response was overwhelming, truly a wind under our wings, with contributions exceeding our goal by 20 percent. In our How the Funds Are Used page we detail what we did with last year’s generous gifts and what we hope to accomplish next year. There was so much progress during the year, we’re back this November-December to ask again for your support to keep this momentum going.

Not long ago, before the now ubiquitous Internet, information was hard to come by. Sources were few but mostly authoritative, such as encyclopedias and books which had been carefully tooled by trained editors and fact checkers.

We quickly crossed the bridge to the other side, and now we find ourselves in the opposite situation. There is a monsoon of information from all kinds of sources. Every second, hundreds of millions of us around the globe are looking to the Internet for information on topics that interest us, including Hinduism. What we need now is organized knowledge that we can count on being authentic.

Our sites provide that--and they do it for free and without ads. Nowhere else will you find such a wealth of resources about our faith, carefully researched and compiled from across the globe. How important is it to you to have good resources on Hinduism online? How important is it that your friends and business associates, your children and their teachers, when doing a search about Hinduism, find a place that explains it from the inside, without academic biases or gross misconceptions?

There are two more reasons you might consider donating. One is that your donation will go straight to the enhancement of the sites and the content, not staff salaries or administrative overhead, since these sites are created and maintained by selfless monks who work for free and live simply in a verdant monastery on the island of Kauai.

The final reason to give is that a portion of your tax-deductible contribution goes into the Digital Dharma Drive Endowment that was begun last year. We put 10 percent, almost $6,000, of the 2010 contributions into this permanent fund. Each year we plan to add to that endowment, which will generate a steady income for decades to come, protecting the digital future of Hinduism, your religious heritage.

We are here, on the Internet, for you today. With your help, we will be here for you for years to come, in the lives of your grandchildren--and perhaps in your next life.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami

Guru Mahasannidhanam of Kauai Aadheenam

Publisher of Hinduism Today

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