Below you will find links to a digital movie of seven stone craftsmen from India. They have been trained in the sthapati tradition of Hindu temple construction and have been assembling the completed hand-carved white granite stones of the San Marga Iraivan Temple at Kauai's Hindu Monastery in Hawaii since May 31, 2001. Since then they have erected the first 9 levels, or courses, of the temple's inner sanctum, bringing this tower up to about 11 feet in height (it will be 35 feet tall when completed).

This movie depicts one of the many processes involved, moving two 4,000-pound stones by hand into the temple sanctum's 10th course, on June 6th, 2002. As each level of the temple is completed, a steel-reinforced wooden box is built up around it and filled with sand to protect the finished, jointed stones, and to give them a platform on which to work. The temple stones are held together only by gravity, without any supporting substructure, as such temples have been constructed in India for thousands of years. -- Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami conceived Iraivan Temple in a mystic vision in February of 1975, and so the effort has been 27 years in the making.

To carve the stones of Iraivan Temple by hand in the traditional way was a key principle established by Gurudeva, as he wished to encourage and renew the declining stone carving tradition of India with this grand project, to pass the ancient art on to the next generation, rather that resort to modern electrical and hydraulic tools. Thus, a village outside Bangalore, India, was established in 1991 where over 75 stone craftsmen and their families live and carve, without any modern, mechanized implements, the white granite stones of this traditional, Agamic, Chola-style temple to God Siva. Another 14 carvers work on parts of the carving at three other sites in South India. More than half of the stones of the temple are finished, and containers of completed stones are regularly shipped to Hawaii as assembly progresses. Iraivan Temple is the only all-stone Hindu temple ever erected outside of India.

NOTE: You must have QuickTime 4 or later installed. If you do not have the latest version, you can download it from Apple's website here.

More about Iraivan Temple. Daily update of construction progress.