Monkeypod and Pine Meet Shum

A few months ago Paramacharya Sadasivanatha gave a whole lot of thought to what to put in the large blank area on the facade above the guru pitham seat, called simhasana, the holy spot established by Gurudeva as the seat of authority for Kauai Aadheenam, back in the 1970s. It was time for something new. After lots of noodling and discussion, the plan that you will see manifest in this post came to be.

Here, above the seat, on what was a plane redwood panel, is the completed piece, in context with other improvements recently made to the pitham, including new curtains and cushions hand embroidered in India. The is the guru\

s seat in our meditation room, called the Guru Temple, adjacent to Kadavul Temple. '

Our first task was to find the wood. We made a trip to the lumber piles to find the choicest pieces of monkeypod and picked out two consecutive slabs from a log that we milled five years ago. These we jointed and laminated together

We roughed out the round and worked it on the lathe, perfecting the circle and making the surface slightly dome shaped. The second challenge was finding a handsome background, something light to make the circle stand out. We choice a pair of Cook pine planks. The panel glued up is 35 x 56 inches.

Natyam Mayuranatha helped create for us the large Shum image out of pine, cutting it out on the large laser etcher. We made a recess for it to fit into by 1) tacking it to the monkeypod, 2) painstakingly tracing it with a knife, 3) cutting the bulk of wood away with a router, and 4) using chisels to sneak up the the knifeline. That process took about 8 hours. Then we were able to press and glue the pine into the recess.

We left the pine 1\/8- inch proud, planed away the bulk and sanded it all smooth with hand blocks.

For more sanding, we put the piece back on the lathe.

We then sealed it with sanding sealer, and applied many coats of waterborne finish, sanding between coats, building up a smooth surface, We sanded out the final coat with 1,000 grit Abralon pads to give a satin sheen.

Here is it placed on the pine board. We used two pieces of monkeyod from the same log for \"breadboard ends,\" to trim it out. The Tamil and Sanskrit letters, Aum Namah Shivaya, were also cut out on the laser etcher.

Here is the final product. The inlay is the 18th character in Shum, in Gurudeva\

s mystical language of meditation. Adding the dot you see to the right distinguishes is as the name of the language. The circle also represent Parasiva, Absolute Reality, the Self. The next task here is to replace, with matching monkeypod, the trimming below the panel.'
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