Every religion is weird, but there are degrees of weirdness.
For example, I'm not at all attracted to fundamentalist Christianity. Yet I used to enjoy reading the mystical philosophizing of Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian who, pleasingly, was decried as a heretic.
And I also have enjoyed learning about the less religious side of Hinduism, Vedanta, which focuses on meditation, the nature of consciousness, and other esoteric subjects rather than rituals.
However, a fascinating article in the April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker reminded me that Hinduism also has its more weird religious side. "The Secret of the Temple," by Jake Halperin, tells the tale of how treasures likely worth at least twenty billion dollars have been found in the Sri Padmanabbaswamy temple in Trivandrum, India.
The full article is only available to subscribers, but on his web site Halperin has shared a PDF file of the piece he wrote. He notes:
April 30th: Secrets of the Temple (The New Yorker): Life at this temple in Southern India was quiet until two secret vaults were discovered. One vault contained $20 billion dollars worth of treasure. The other vault, which is supposedly cursed, remains unopened. So what lies inside? My ten-page article is in the April 30th edition of the magazine. Click here to read -- but please note that the last line of the article is cut off -- it should read: "No, let it be." You can also view story in pictures: Click here to view a slideshow.
Below are some excerpts from Halperin's article.
I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, for many years. So I'm generally familiar with the aspects of Hindu culture mentioned in the excerpts. Heck, I even subscribed to some of them myself in my true-believing days.
They sure sound weird to me now, though. Deities needing a legal guardian. Devotees considering themselves slaves of deities. Poor people happy to give money to deities who accumulate vast treasures.
After several minutes, Padmanabhan looked at me, smiled, and explained that he had been praying. There was a festival that day, and the temple's custodians had removed an idol from the sanctum sanctorum and were parading it around a courtyard. He was hoping to get a glimpse of it. The idol, he told me, "is like an incarnation of God, so it is as if God himself is coming out of the temple."
Like many observant Hindus, Padmanabhan believes that a temple's deity -- in this case, the supreme god Vishnu -- resides within its walls. Worshippers come to make offerings of flowers, incense, silver, and gold. Whatever wealth accumulates belongs to the deity.
Padmanabhan told me that it had become his driving purpose in life to serve Vishnu and, in so doing, protect the deity's hoard. He explained, "In Lord Krishna's Bhagavad Gita, he says we are only small things before the great lord. So if he says, 'Dance,' we dance, and if he says 'Sit,' we sit. I am just a mosquito before him."
Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian.
...On the walls were black-and-white photographs of his deceased relatives. Several photographs were adorned with flowers. Nair, like many Hindus, reveres his ancestors almost as deities; one of his grandfathers, he said, had kept his most valuable possession in a small wooden box, which Nair had inherited. "I've never ventured to open it," he said. Why not?
"Probably it contains wealth, probably it contains a diary and some letters written by him," he said. Many people in India had boxes like this. "Sometimes these boxes contain valuables and sometimes nothing -- but, because of our belief in ancestors, we don't care to open it. We keep them as something almost divine."
...Like Nair, most residents of Trivandrum had not been clamoring for the temple's vaults to be searched... in India the wealth stored in the vaults of Hindu temples is viewed largely in spiritual, not monetary, terms. William Harman, a scholar of Hinduism at the University of Tennessee, told me, "People make deals with deities, and if they receive what they want they pay up."
...For centuries, a maharaja from the family had led processions to the temple, and had escorted the idol when it was marched to the sea, twice a year, for a ritual bathing. By custom, the maharaja even had to ask the deity for permission to leave town.
...The Princess, who is petite and middle-aged, was dressed in a simple cotton sari. She described herself as not a "servant" of the deity but his "slave."
A servant has the right to leave his master," she said. "If I don't like to work with you, I walk out and I say goodbye, but a slave has no option of independent action. He is forever bound to his master's feet. So we prefer that."
...Ganesh firmly opposed taking any wealth out of the temple, and said that he avoided discussing the matter with his father: "As a Hindu, I see my father and mother as gods. We won't raise our voice against them."
...Ganesh said that he gave the deity whatever money he could spare, which was sometimes as little as one rupee -- roughly two cents. Everything in the temple, Ganesh said, came from devotees like him, and he added, "So of course it belongs to God!"
Wouldn't it be a good thing, I asked, if the deity's wealth were used to help people? By that logic, Ganesh said, valuable objects should also be removed from churches and mosques. ...It was surprising that, in a place with rampant poverty, there wasn't a greater demand to nationalize the treasure.
In India we have a small temple for my community. Our ancestors do some rituals annually by offering sweets and fruits.
We don't have any idols of god inside but there is a crafted wooden box locked which will not be opened by anyone and I never got right answer from any of my relations why do we worship the wooden box, what is inside this small box? Why don't we just open and see it?
During your exploration to India by anychance you discovered such type temple??? With whom could I get the right information
Posted by: Ravi | January 14, 2015 at 08:48 PM