Mayapura, West Bengal
Time Is
Heard
It used to be that the chokidhara (security guard) would pull a rope that would strike the
bell every hour, and also on the half hour. You could keep track of the
time. Well, that is no more.
The new upcoming temple (TOVP) has within its
interior a timely strike of a resonant chime.
At 4:00 a.m. you can hear that sweet sound. The source is either a recording, or the real
thing. I haven’t quite figured it out.
It reminds me of home. Where I grew up in Blenheim, Ontario,
population 3000 at the time, the chimes would sound from St. Mary’s Parish
Church. It was beautiful. Now we have it here—a little touch of the
west; a touch of Big Ben perhaps.
With the temple manifesting before our eyes,
you can see the east and west influence, architecturally. It is as our guru, Srila Prabhupada, wanted—a
marriage of the two cultures. Back in
1976, on America’s two-hundredth anniversary, he sat in a lawn chair in
Washington DC and like millions of people that day, waited for the evening
fireworks to explode in the sky. He
contemplated the shape of the Capitol Building for quite some time and remarked
that he would like the temple in Mayapur to resemble that edifice.
It was July the 4th and it appears that a seed
was planted.
May the Source be with you!
6 km
No comments:
Post a Comment