Hand-carved temple finds home on Hawaii's Kauai
Paramacharya Sadasivanatha Palaniswami and Pravinkumar Vasudeva, right, who serves as priest of Iraivan Temple, at Kauai Hindu Monastery on July 9, 2023, in Kapaa, Hawaii.
(AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)
KAPAA, Hawaii (AP) — 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 Hawaii 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, modeled after millennia-old temples in South India — is unexpected and stunning. Less than 1% of Hawaii'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.
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