How Your 2022 Donations Were Used
Last year’s Digital Dharma Drive contributions totaling $120,339.80, were allocated toward a variety of projects, including: web improvements, digital assets, ebooks and major translations, with ten percent set aside for a permanent Digital Dharma Drive Endowment that, in the far future, will take the place of this annual fund-raising effort. Here are the highlights of the team’s accomplishments in 2023.
Hinduism Today Website Development
This year we continued investing days and days upgrading legacy issues on our Hinduism Today website, adding categories, tags and feature images for articles from as far back as 1996. Of course, each quarter a new issue of the magazine was created, prepared for the web, made into an epub and uploaded by our team.
Online Books
Our monks have been gradually working on a rebuilt version of our Himalayan Academy website. Recent activity has included the lengthy process of transferring all our books and publications to the new site and database. You can see a preview of the unfinished book platform here. Next our many thousands of audio files, such as bhajans and upadeshas by our gurus, are being ported over.
Iraivan Documentary
Over the years we have released short videos chronicling the all-stone Iraivan Temple’s origins and progress. A longer documentary was created in the 90s by a well-wisher. Forty-eight years have passed since Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami’s 3-fold vision of God Siva which began the process, and 33 years since he chiselled the first granite stone block in Bengaluru, India. After the soft-opening consecration in March of this year to begin daily pujas in Iraivan Temple, we commissioned videographers to create an updated 23-minute documentary film of the whole project. See it here.
Kadavul Reservations System
Thanks to your support, Kadavul Temple’s reservation system for our many daily guests continues to function seamlessly. This system provides us with the control we need to manage a steady stream of daily pilgrims without being overwhelmed or overcrowded. You can see it, or even make a reservation, here.
Saint Tayumanavar Project
Work continued on the project to bring the devotional songs of Saint Tayumanavar (1706-1744) into sensible and approachable English. Not an easy task. He was one of the most prolific spiritual poets of South India, a favorite of Ramana Maharishi and often quoted by Yogaswami to his devotees. His presentation of Vedanta/Siddhanta is seminal, powerful and profound, worthy of capturing. Yet we have never brought him forward, until now. His 1,454 Tamil poems were translated into English by Dr. B. Natarajan back in the 80s as a gift to Gurudeva. For the past year, the editing team has been refining his work, in consultation with Tamil scholars. The completed work will include the Tamil original, Dr. Natarjan’s biographical introduction, and an extensive commentary on the significance of the saint’s historic and profoundly devotional work by Father Thomas, which he wrote in 1989 for his Master’s thesis. Kerala muralist Suresh Muthukulam, among India’s greatest artists, just completed ten masterful canvases for the book we plan to print in 2024 (most likely using Amazon’s new digital publishing facilities).
Translations
Ram Prasad, an Chennai-based linguist who translated The Guru Chronicles, Merging with Siva and Living with Siva for us, has been hired to translate Gurudeva’s 592-page Loving Ganesha into Tamil. He has finished the main text is is working now on the back matter resources. We have also had Path to Siva translated into Telegu and Portuguese.
Narayan continues his work of narrating Merging with Siva to make it available as an audio book. Raj is a popular actor both in India and the US. Ten years ago he created the audio for The Guru Chronicles.
4-D Major Upgrade
For years, our major data-base tool, called 4-D, languished without the recommended upgrades. With Digital Dharma funds we are able to implement the important changes that bring it current and fully functional.
Hinduism Today
Our HT app (get for iOS | get for Android) and website editions get many thousands of visitors (up to 40,000 for the most popular articles). In 2023 we rebuilt the app in a more efficient form, cutting out many thousands of dollars of future operating costs. Despite the tragic events in Ukraine, and the cascading effects throughout the region, four more editions of Hinduism Today were published and distributed (with our support) in the Russian language by the team in Moscow. You can access them on our website here.
Sanskrit Chanting Guide
After four years of work, our “Basic Guide to Sanskrit Chanting” is now complete and available on our website at sanskritguide.com. It is the result of collaboration with Adaityananda Saraswati, Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami and our publications team. This free resource for learning to chant well, according to the traditional rules, includes audio files for the 50 or so exercises in the course. It also features a collection of traditional chants.
Saiva Atmartha Puja
The home puja for initiates has been upgraded and will be available soon our our new website. We had chants proof-read by Sanskritists, and brought the Devanagari into unicode so it works on all platforms.
New MiniMela Online Store
With our new hosting platform and powerful webservers, we were able to encompass new and rebuilt website for our minimela.com gift shop, ensuring people all over the world have access to Kauai’s sacred rudrakshas and a plethora of other sacred items.
Grapple
Our inhouse-designed file sharing and version-control tool, called Grapple (which is critical, used daily by the publications team), had been suddenly disabled with the introduction of Mac OS Sonoma. We were able to hire a London code-warrior to make the changes needed to bring it back to life.
Miscellaneous
We sent thousands of pages of historical documents and research papers to India where a team is scanning, proofing and OCRing them. No longer hidden in filing cabinets, they will become searchable on our server. This brings us close to completing the full digitization and dissolution of the old-style physical library. Unexpectedly, it has also allowed us to share thousands of books and articles on Saivism with other institutions, most recently the nascent Qi University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
We continued our agreement with ProQuest to distribute Himalayan Academy’s books digitally throughout the world. They provide authentic, curated sources of information to researchers, libraries, universities and government institutions.
Last but not least, the donation website you are using right now was rebuilt with help from the Digital Dharma Drive. Jai Ganesha!