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The San Marga Iraivan Temple is a Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva located on Kauai, an island in the state of Hawaii, USA. "Iraivan" means "One Above All," and is one of the oldest words for God in the Tamil language. It is the first all-stone, white granite temple to be built in the western hemisphere[1] whose construction began in 1990.[2] The Iraivan Temple is located next to the Wailua River and 8 km from Mount Waialeale. It is maintained by the Saiva Siddhanta Church which is also known as Kauai Aadheenam and Kauai's Hindu Monastery. The temple is under construction. The main murti, or worshipful icon, is a rare spathika Sivalinga, a pointed, six-faced 700-pound clear quartz crystal.
Sri Trichy Mahaswamigal (d. 2005) of Kailash Ashram, Bangalore, describes the temple's importance: "The Iraivan Temple is going to be to America what the temples of Chidambaram, Madurai, Rameshwaram, and other great Siva temples are to India."[3]
History
The Iraivan Temple was envisioned by the founder Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, on February 15, 1975.[4] He required that the temple be made without the use of machinery.[5]
In 1990, two swamis, Sri Sivaratnapuri Mahaswamigal and Sri Balagangadharanatha provided eleven acres of land outside Bangalore, India. The land served as a carving ground for 75 stone-carvers who hand-carved more than 4,000 blocks of granite to be transported to the temple site at Kauai.[4] Beginning in 2001, the stone were shipped to Kauai and assembly begun by a team of silpi temple carvers under the direction of a master architect or sthapati. The 3.2 million pound temple is still under construction.[6][7][8]
The temple faces south and is a Chola architectural style temple and designed according to the Vastu and Agamas scriptures by V. Ganapati Sthapati. It is made entirely from granite and possesses a number of rare architectural features.[10][8][11] At the entrance of the temple, there is a 32 diameter bell and chain carved from one entire stone that hangs from the ceiling.[12] The pillars of temple include unique features, such as eight lion-shaped pillars with a rotatable stone ball in each of their mouths and two pillars with 16 carved rods that produce musical tones when struck with a mallet.[12]
The temple is carved entirely by hand by craftsmen who follow and preserve traditional methods, shaping the stone with small hammers and utilizing over 70 types of chisels. There is the 4-foot-thick (1.2 m) foundation made of a crack-free, 7,000-psi formula using fly ash, a by-product of coal burning.[citation needed]
Vastu architecture aims at creating a space that will elevate the vibration of the individual to resonate with the vibration of the built space, which in turn is in tune with universal space. The whole space of the temple is defined in multiples and fractions of one unit, 11 feet (3.4 m) and 71/4 inches. Pillars through the temple are spaced and structured to serve as energy points for the building. Iraivan Temple will be completely free of electricity for mystical reasons, as decreed by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami.[citation needed]
Deities
The inner sanctum of the temple houses the murti (sacred image) of Shiva in the form of a rare Spatika Lingam, a pointed, six-faced 700-pound clear quartz crystal.[8][13] In the early 1980s, Subramuniyaswami had been seeing the crystal in his dreams. He found it in 1987 and brought it to Kauai. The stone, estimated to be 50 million years old, was not cut out of rock by a miner. Instead, it was found in a perfect state encased in mud, probably harvested from its original outcropping by an earthquake.The Spatika Lingam is considered especially sacred because it represents the element of akasha.[3] The campus also hosts and maintains the Kadavul temple in which Shiva in the form of Nataraja is the primary deity.[8]
