Books and Publications

Guru Puja, Vow Taking, Booklet Reprint

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Today was our monthly Gurudeva Chitra Padapuja. Here is a random selection from Gurudeva’s audio archive–

Hindu view of diet items

A few days ago one of our local Master Course students, Katrina St Marie, took the Dasama Bhaga Vrata, or tithing vow. Text of the vow–

Oh! Divine Beings of all three worlds, let us bring our minds to rest in the darsana of Him who has one tusk, let us meditate upon Him who has the form of an elephant with a curved trunk, May He guide us always along the right path.

Vrata: I believe in You, the one Supreme God, Lord Siva, and the Gods of our Saivite faith, and in the Saiva Dharma. In love and trust I recognize Your goodness in providing for my every material and spiritual need. I accept the principle of Dasamamsha (giving one tenth of my gross income) as the method by which I may acknowledge my gratitude to you, Lord Sva, and share in helping You fulfill and perpetuate Your work on earth. As an act of dedication, I am resolved this day to begin (or continue) the regular practice of tithing.

We have a small booklet of fourteen lessons called Know thy Self. We finally ran out of copies and, following our new pattern of book publication, have set it up to be print-on-demand by Amazon KDP. In the process, we have shifted from the unusual horizontal layout to a typical vertical layout.

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Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras Proof Arrives

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  • Preview of cover boundaries
  • Preview of content boundaries
  • A bright rainbow from a week ago. A faint second rainbow above

A few days ago we received one printed copy of our new Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras book as a “proof” to check for errors before official publishing with the Amazon on-demand book printing facility. We found a couple small things to fix and uploaded a new PDF manuscript to the Amazon website. Their software does a initial processing of the PDF file to check for errors. In a Preview window you can see if all the images and text fall within the boundaries of their margin requirements. That is what two of the images above are showing. There will be alerts shown for specific pages where something needs to be fixed.

All fixes are now complete and we’ll proceed to make the book live on Amazon’s website, and initiate a small print run.

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Artwork Added to HAMSA Site

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Two of our upcoming books are about Sage Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and Saint Tayumanavar’s life and songs. Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami commissioned ten original pieces of art for each book from famed muralist Suresh Muthukulam in Kerala. Though it will be a while before the books are published, the artwork is now available on our Himalayan Academy Museum of Spiritual Art (HAMSA) in the Suresh Muthukulam collection, with detailed captions for each. Here is a sample from each group:

Tayumanavar

Tayumanavar, with accounting journals under his arm, walks barefoot to the castle, where King Nayak has engaged him as his financial manager. Days later, two men examine the footprints he left in the sand, astonished to find they have not disappeared as one would expect. They take it as a miraculous happening. Above, Siva uses His trishula to row a divine Moon Boat through the heavens, watching the events below. On the left, a family of toddy tappers walk the aerial ropes between palmyra palm trees, gathering the nectar for making jaggery and toddy. Below, a woman sells the palm nuts. A bullock cart full of kingly supplies approaches the castle, and elephants, one with a flower in his trunk, greet the saint on his first day. Below, under a spreading banyan tree, two philosophers debate the merits of Vedanta and Siddhanta. It was Tayumanavar’s life mission to show the unity of these two great views.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

Here, Rishi Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras (ca. 200-500 BCE), meditates while seated on the coiled body of a giant serpent. His hands are held in Shuni Mudra, which is said to awaken intuition and higher consciousness, and to purify thought and emotion. The banyan tree, with its vast rooting tendrils, represents the strength and longevity of Hinduism. Above, Sadasiva rides on His winged vahana, Nandi. In the branches, two cobras have wrapped themselves around the ola leaf manuscript of the Yoga Sutras, protecting it for future generations. Near the bottom, Siva is present in the sage’s personal Sivalinga. Subtly, Siva’s two all-seeing cosmic eyes peer out from the sky behind, just above the horizon.

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