The Building of the Temple

It took four years—from 1984 until 1988—just to see to the accuracy of the geometry of the yantra on the ground. Guruji was helped at every stage of construction by Kāmākhyā, who acted as his consultant throughout.

And so the Meru began to materialize, with Guruji providing designs, work assignments, and technical guidance, and area villagers serving as day laborers.

The temple dimensions were (108’ X 108’ X 54’) and its structure consisted of the following:

• The ground floor consists of the bhupura (i.e., the outer three lines housing the 10 siddhis, eight matrikas, and 10 mudra shaktis), the 16-petaled lotus, the eight-petaled lotus, and the devis of the 14-cornered figure.

• The first floor [U.S. second floor] contains the devis of outer 10-triangle figure, and

• The second floor [U.S. third floor] houses the devis of the inner 10 triangle figure.

• The highest point, at the dome, houses the eight vagdevis, the trikona and the bindu.” (In addition to this array, there are several invisible devis “hidden in the three lines of the bhupura,” Guruji noted.)

Source: "Goddess and the Guru"

Creation of the Khaḍgamāla sculptures

By the end of 1988, after years of painstaking design and off-and-on construction—progress generally fluctuating on some combination of donor largesse and Guruji’s physical availability—the primary frame of the Śrī Meru temple was nearing completion. Yet an equally daunting task still lay ahead: to populate it with sculptures that embodied the myriad deities of Śrī Vidyā ritual practice, more than a hundred of them in all. Once again, the task was almost overwhelming in its scope.

At this point, a third form of the Goddess had begun communicating with Guruji about the temple. Rather than Bālā or Kāmākhyā, it was Hlādinī (a lover of Lord Kṛṣṇa) who spoke to him. Over the entire period of construction, Guruji had a total of three divine mentors: first Bālā, then Kāmākhyā and finally Hlādinī.

In accordance with the Goddess’s instructions, Guruji began systematically meditating on each successive Khaḍgamāla goddess. Hlādinī herself would take the form of each, while Guruji carefully noted “her form, posture, and weapons,” and then described them to a professional sculptor. The innate artistic abilities he displayed in childhood came in handy during this process. “As she revealed each goddess to me, I would translate those visions to the sculptor in words and drawings, and he would then use these descriptions to create concrete castings,” Guruji said.

Guruji found this visualization process to be immensely enjoyable, often spending hours in meditation for a single devī. Guruji would note “I saw how her perfect creative potential manifested itself in each of her different aspects, in each varying image of her beauty, all in three dimensions,” he said. “Each one unique, each perfect in her own way.”

Guruji wanted their skin color, eyes, attire—their entire forms—to be as real as they could be, so as to help practitioners feel their presence.

Over the next seven years, from 1988 until 1994, the Meru gradually filled with Khaḍgamāla Devi sculptures. Ninety were Gopalachari’s near-life-size figures, crafted in cement mortar and painted in bright enamels. Seventy of these were arranged at ground level with many housed under their own roofs, creating a series of mini-shrines within the Meru grounds. Another 20 were positioned on the first and second levels above the ground. Then came a number of smaller bronze deities as one approached the top.

Source: "Goddess and the Guru"

Prāṇa Pratiṣṭhā of Sahasrākṣī Devī (1990)

At the focal point of the Meru temple, sitting in regal splendor within the dome, is a magnificent (and completely traditional) black granite sculpture of Devipuram’s main deity, Śrī Sahasrākṣī Rājarajeśvarī. An important form of Lalitā Tripurasundarī in temple worship, Sahasrākṣī symbolically contains, subsumes and transcends all of the Meru’s other deities.

Her monumental vigraha had been created to Guruji’s precise specifications by Sri Netranandam, a well-known shilpi, or hereditary religious sculptor, from the famed temple city of Tirupati, 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the south. Netranandam’s Sahasrākṣī carries a noose and an elephant goad in her two upper hands, flower arrows and a sugar cane bow in her lower two hands. She is seated atop (generally understood to mean “in sexual union with”) the prone figure of her consort Kāmeśvara, one of Lord Śiva’s most handsome and alluring forms. Her right leg is tucked up and her left foot hanging down, indicating her “left” or Tantric orientation. It took Netranandam three months to complete the sculpture, which would become the first deity installed and consecrated in the Meru, via a formal prāṇa-pratiṣṭhā ceremony.

On Wednesday, May 9, 1990, a six-foot, 650-kilogram (1,433-pound) Sahasrākṣī sculpture was installed in the Meru Temple. The formal pratiṣṭhā (life-infusion) ceremony began a couple of weeks later on the new moon day of Thursday, May 24, and continued for 11 days until Monday, June 4, 1990.

Mahākumbhābhiṣekam (1994)

As 1993 drew to a close, the colossal task of building the Devipuram temples—initiated a full decade earlier, following Guruji’s first visions of the goddess Kāmākhyā—was finally nearing completion. The moment had arrived to consecrate the Śrī Meru temple, and Devipuram as a whole, as a living center of worship, by way of the ceremony known as the Mahā-kumbha-abhiṣekam, or “grand ritual bathing,” of the temple.

Kumbha-abhiṣekam is a general term for the grand celebration and series of purification rituals that are done [following] the construction or major renovation of a temple. It’s traditionally performed every 12 years, at which time any repairs are also commissioned. “Kumbha” refers to the highest peak of the temple, which receives abhiṣekam [ritual bathing] at the culmination of the festival. A full kalaśam (or many kalaśa, as is often the case) is charged with mantras and pujas for several days. On the final day of the observance, the murti and/or actual temple itself receives the abhiṣekam of all the kalaśa used throughout the festival. The remaining water is then sprinkled throughout the property.

By Friday, February 25, the day of the Magha full moon and the final day of the abhiṣekam, the largest crowds yet—estimates generally ranged between 10,000 and 20,000—surged into Devipuram to witness the festival’s culminating event, the ritual bathing of the temple.

The video (courtesy of William Thomas) is showing the bathing of the Devī during the Mahākumbhābhiṣekam

Following morning pujas, everyone who had participated in the homas gathered to carry the kalaśa and deities from the Yagna Shala back up to the top of the Śrī Meru temple.

Having reached Sahasrākṣī’s home at the top of the temple, members of the procession mounted a specially constructed scaffold one by one, carrying their kalaśa even further upward to the very tip of the bindu. There Guruji stacked the nine pots into a conical tower, which he then—with the help of other officiants—hoisted onto his head. At that very moment a streak of bright white light—some say it looked like a Śiva liṅgam—flashed across the cloudless blue sky, momentarily engulfing those at the top of the temple, and then streaked away again. The vast crowd reacted with a collective gasp; a Times of India photographer, Mickey Menon of Bombay, happened to catch the sequence on film.

Śrī Matre Namaḥ,

Very beautiful and lively painting of Bālā Tripurasundarī, wish I could see Her like this one day!

Śrī Gurubhyo Namaḥ