U.S.A.
December 4, 2023
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 9
How a massive all-granite, hand-carved Hindu
temple ended up on Hawai‘i’s lush Kauai Island
By Deepa Bharath
The Associated Press
APAA, Hawai‘i — It is the only
all-granite, hand-carved Hindu
temple in the west built without
power tools or electricity, and it’s nestled
on one of the smaller islands in Hawai‘i
surrounded by lush gardens and forests.
On the island of Kauai, the presence of
the Iraivan Temple — a white granite
edifice with gold-leafed domes, modelled
after millennia-old temples in South India
— is unexpected and stunning. Less than
1% of Hawai‘i’s 1.4 million residents are
Hindus and on Kauai, the number of
Hindus may not even exceed 50, according
to some estimates.
But that hasn’t deterred the two dozen
monks living at the Kauai Aadheenam
campus from being good neighbors and
stewards of their faith tradition, drawing
pilgrims and seekers from around the
globe. In this all-male temple-monastery
complex, the monks study and practice
Shaivism, a major tradition within
Hinduism, which holds Lord Shiva as the
supreme being.
One of the order’s monks, who has spent
decades supervising the temple’s con-
struction and tending to its gardens, is
Paramacharya Sadasivanatha Palani-
swami, who came to the Kauai community
of Kapaa in 1968 with his teacher and the
center’s founder, the late Satguru Sivaya
Subramuniyaswami. He says the Iraivan
Temple was inspired by the founder’s
mystical vision of Lord Shiva seated on a
large boulder on these grounds. Its
construction began in 1990 and continued
after the founder’s death in 2001. The word
K
“Iraivan” means “he who is worshipped” in
Tamil, a language spoken about 8,000
miles away in southern India.
The monks created an entire village in
India for the artisans who hand-built the
temple over the last 33 years, said
Palaniswami.
“Our guru believed that electricity
brings a magnetic force field and a psychic
impact,” he said. “It’s like when the power
goes out during a storm, something dif-
ferent happens when there is no electri-
city. There is a certain quiet, a calmness.”
Illuminated only by oil lamps, Iraivan
has no fans or air-conditioning. Its
architectural style is from the Chola
Dynasty, which ruled parts of what is now
South India and Sri Lanka for about 1,500
years, starting in 300 B.C.E.
The main deity is the 700-pound quartz
crystal shivalingam, an abstract represen-
tation of Shiva. The campus also houses
Kadavul Temple dedicated to Shiva in the
cosmic dancer form, or Nataraja.
Priest Pravinkumar Vasudeva arrived
in March, when the temple — 3,600 stones,
pillars, and beams made with roughly 3.2
million pounds of granite — was
consecrated. He is still amazed it stands on
this tiny island.
“In India, you could possibly build
something like this, but it hasn’t been
done,” he said. “Here, it is nearly
impossible, but it has been done.”
The order’s origin story began in 1948
with founder Subramuniyaswami, a
former San Francisco ballet dancer who
sought out a spiritual teacher. In northern
Sri Lanka, Guru Yogaswami initiated him
into Shaivism and instructed him to build
UNIQUE TEMPLE. The sun shines down on
the golden spires of the Iraivan Temple at the Kauai
Hindu Monastery in Kapaa, Hawai‘i. The temple is
made entirely of hand-carved granite, which the
monks have been constructing for the last 33 years.
It was completed in March and marked with a special
opening ceremony the same month. (AP Photo/Jessie
Wardarski, File)
“a bridge between the east and west,” said
Palaniswami, the garden-tending monk.
Based in San Francisco in 1969, the
founder “felt the sacred pull” of the Kauai
property while on a retreat there, the
monk said. It was a rundown Tropical Inn
resort at the time.
To Native Hawaiians, the plot of land
was known as Pihanakalani, or “the
fullness of heaven.” Cognizant of that
connection, Subramuniyaswami wanted
to make sure the new temple aligned with
Native Hawaiian spirits.
So 35 years ago, he reached out to Lynn
Muramoto, a local Buddhist leader who
had navigated a similar situation. She is
the president of the Lawai International
Center on Kauai, which is home to 88
Shingon Buddhist shrines on an ancient
sacred site where Hawaiians once came for
healing.
She visited the temple site with the late
Abraham Kawai’i, a revered Hawaiian
spiritual practitioner, or kahu, and
witnessed the “deeply moving” moment
when Kawai’i called the location “perfect.”
Sabra Kauka, a Native Hawaiian
cultural practitioner on Kauai, said she
was “a little aghast” in the beginning, but
then consulted Aunty Momi Mo’okini
Lum, her calabash aunt who is descended
from Moikeha, the chief from Tahiti who
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