FORT WORTH, TEXAS, June 6, 2014 (Star-Telegram): For five days and nights they have prayed, burned wood and incense, and offered fruits and melons, part of the Maha Kumbhabhishekam rituals in which several granite statues are prepared to be consecrated as living vessels. The ceremonies will culminate Saturday with the opening of the new Hindu Temple of Greater Fort Worth.
“This is a consecration ceremony to start the new temple,” said Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami (publisher of Hinduism Today and HPI), who came from the Kauai Hindu Monastery in Hawaii to help with the temple’s opening. Rituals have been conducted since Tuesday outside the 12,500-square-foot temple and community center building on the 7-acre campus on Longvue Avenue in far west Fort Worth. The temple’s priest, Sri Murali Krishna, and visiting holy men have presided over the ceremonies, which are leading up to the installation of the statues in the almost $3 million temple’s 5,000-square-foot sanctum sanctorum.
“On Saturday, they’ll pour the [holy water] on the statues to bring them to life, infusing them with life,” Veylanswami said. Swami Chidananda, who came from Mumbai, India, to be part of the ceremony, said the statues will be treated like people. “We look at the statues thereafter as being alive and vibrant,” Chidananda said. “We give them food, bathe them and dress them.”
Veylanswami’s associate from the Kauai monastery, Sannyasin Senthilnathaswami, explained that the statues are not the focus of worship, but the focal points through which worship is channeled. “You don’t worship a statue. You worship God through a statue,” Senthilnathaswami said. “Think of a telephone. When you talk into one, you aren’t talking to the telephone, you’re talking to someone else through the telephone.”