Chapter 16: Every tradition: services and what they need · Part 5
Hinduism
The Self-Realization Fellowship and the Sri Sathya Sai Organization don't describe themselves as Hindu; scholars class both with the Hindu traditions, so the game lists them here, as their descriptions say.
Hindu temple
The independent community temple that immigrants from India have built across America since the first two were consecrated in 1977 (the Ganesha Temple in Flushing and Sri Venkateswara in Pittsburgh): a local temple society, a nonprofit answering to no body in India or America, with a hall of many deities. It's a house of gods more than an assembly. The temple opens early and closes late, and families come when they like for darshan, to see the deities and be seen by them, ringing the bell, circling the sanctums, leaving an offering in the hundi and taking the priest's blessing; most come at the weekend, and a festival brings thousands. The priests keep a fixed timetable of rites whether anyone comes or not: the deities woken, bathed (abhishekam), dressed, fed and put to rest, with an arati each evening. The temple as written is South Indian (Agamic): granite murtis of Venkateswara, Shiva, Ganesha and the goddess, each in its own sanctum, Brahmin priests trained in the Agamas and recruited from India on religious-worker visas, housed on the grounds and paid little by American standards, and a Telugu and Tamil community; a North Indian temple, with marble murtis on one altar, pandits, Hindi, and a Sunday programme of bhajans, havan and arati with a free meal, is its variant. Its economy is a price list: archanas, abhishekams, pujas in homes, weddings, namings and sacred threads, besides the hundi, the canteen and the wedding hall. An elected board of trustees, often with seats for big donors, hires and pays the priests, and an executive committee runs the place; life members vote. There is no rite of joining, no sermon as a rule, and no seeking of converts. The premises are vegetarian, without eggs or alcohol; shoes come off at the door; cremation is away from the temple. Practice varies from temple to temple, and many grow mixed, adding shrines for every community they serve.
3 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Indo-Caribbean mandir
The Sanatan Dharma mandir of Guyanese and Trinidadian Hindus in America, most of them in Richmond Hill, Queens, and South Florida: descendants of the indentured labourers taken from India to the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917, English-speaking, a century and a half apart from India, and some 300,000 to 400,000 strong. Sanatan Dharma is the mainstream, devotional Hinduism of the Caribbean, against the reforming Arya Samaj: Rama and Hanuman above all, with Krishna, Shiva, Durga and Ganesh on one raised altar, and the Ramayan of Tulsidas at its heart. It's the most congregational of Hindu forms, and the most church-like. Its centre is a Sunday-morning service: bhajans to harmonium, dholak and the dhantal, a havan, the arati, a reading, a sermon by the pandit in English (personal, conversational, about the week as much as the scripture), birthdays announced with a bhajan, and lunch. Many mandirs are converted houses, storefronts, churches and synagogues, and some keep the pews, which the elders use, though most of the congregation sits on the floor. The pandit is a married householder, often with a job besides, sometimes the founder of the mandir and the father of the next pandit; families have their own pandit and follow him, and much of his living, and much of the family's religion, is at home: the Hanuman puja or Satyanarayan katha, after which the jhandis, triangular flags on bamboo poles, are planted in the yard. Mandirs are independent, run by trustees and an elected executive, and split when trustees fall out, so Richmond Hill has dozens in a few streets. Phagwah (Holi) is the great public day, with a parade of the mandirs' floats down Liberty Avenue; Maha Shivaratri's all-night abhishekam fills the hall. The premises are vegetarian and dry. Much here rests on general knowledge, marked so in the research note, and practice varies from mandir to mandir.
3 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha
The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, a Hindu fellowship within the Swaminarayan tradition, formed in 1907 when Shastriji Maharaj left the Vadtal diocese over the teaching that Swaminarayan is God (Purushottam) and remains present through a living line of gurus, the ideal devotee (Akshar). Its guru, Mahant Swami Maharaj since 2016, is its spiritual and administrative head, from Ahmedabad. In America, where its first mandir opened in Flushing in 1974, it has over a hundred mandirs, nearly all Gujarati: most are hari mandirs, a hall with a shrine, often a converted building, and six are carved-stone shikharbaddha mandirs, besides the Akshardham at Robbinsville. It is run from the centre: there is no elected board and no hiring of priests; the sadhus, celibate monks initiated by the guru, are assigned to mandirs by the organisation, which appoints the volunteer leaders too and sets the curricula and festivals. The sadhus have no contact with women: they don't speak to them or look at them, so women's sabhas, classes and leadership are run by women, and men and women enter, sit and serve apart throughout. The week centres on the Sunday sabha: kirtans, discourses and the arti, the children, teens and young adults in sabhas of their own by age at the same time, then a shared meal. At a hari mandir the murtis have two artis a day; a stone mandir with resident sadhus keeps five, and closes darshan for the food offerings. Belonging is by vows, not dues: the kanthi for men and the vartman for women, no meat, eggs, alcohol, onion or garlic, and fasting on ekadashi. Volunteers are its great strength: they built much of its stone mandirs, and they cook, teach and run everything. In 2021 Indian artisans who had worked at Robbinsville sued, alleging forced labour on religious-worker visas; BAPS denied it, some plaintiffs withdrew, and in 2025 the Justice Department closed its inquiry without charges, while the civil case went on. Several details of local practice are unverified, as the research note says.
3 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
International Swaminarayan Satsang Organisation
The temples of the original Swaminarayan Sampraday, as its followers call it: the two dioceses Swaminarayan himself founded in 1825, the NarNarayan Dev Gadi at Kalupur, Ahmedabad, whose American body is the International Swaminarayan Satsang Organisation (founded 1978; its first temple in Weehawken, 1987), and the LaxmiNarayan Dev Gadi at Vadtal, whose temples are the variant. Each diocese is led by a hereditary acharya, a married man of Swaminarayan's family, and only he may install the murtis of a temple and initiate sadhus and satsangis; his wife, the Gadiwala, initiates women and leads them. His visits for a temple's anniversary (patotsav) or a summer camp are the year's great events. Beneath him are the sadhus, celibate and in orange, who keep apart from women and money, and an order of women ascetics, the sankhya yoginis, who in India serve the murtis in women's temples and lead the women's discourses; how far they live in American temples is unverified. Each temple is a local nonprofit run by a committee of devotees within the diocese's rules, smaller and looser than BAPS, with which it shares the five daily artis, the thals, Gujarati kirtans, Annakut and the vegetarian discipline but not the doctrine of a living guru. About forty temples serve Gujarati families, many of them Kutchi, most in converted buildings and a few in stone, like Itasca's shikharbaddha mandir. The weekly sabha and katha are on Saturday evening, with the children's Bal Mandal; men and women sit apart. The temples raise much of their money by sponsorships at published prices: a thal for the deities from $51, a festival's yajman for $1,001 to $5,001, flowers by the month, besides the hall for weddings and banquets. Belonging is by initiation and attendance, not dues. Vadtal's succession has been in court since rival acharyas were named, which can pull a temple between factions. The research was thin, and much here is marked unverified in the note.
3 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
International Society for Krishna Consciousness
An ISKCON temple (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the "Hare Krishnas"), founded in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, still its founder-acharya: Gaudiya Vaishnava, the devotional school of Chaitanya, worshipping Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead and chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. Prabhupada taught Krishna consciousness as universal rather than Hindu; many members now call themselves Hindu, a change debated within the movement. The deities are treated as present and never neglected: from mangala arati at 4:30 in the morning to the last arati at nine, pujaris wake, bathe, dress and feed them, and the curtains open for six or seven aratis a day, with the Srimad Bhagavatam class each morning. A small core of initiated devotees, many of them Western converts, live at the temple (brahmacharis in the ashram) and staff it; the much larger congregation, now mostly Indian American families, comes for the Sunday Feast (kirtan, arati, a class, and a free vegetarian feast for everyone) and the festivals, Janmashtami above all. Initiates vow sixteen rounds of japa a day and the four regulative principles: no meat, fish or eggs, no intoxicants (tea and coffee included), no gambling, no illicit sex; the kitchen uses no onion or garlic, and all food is offered to Krishna first. Unlike other Hindu temples, ISKCON seeks converts: book distribution, chanting in the streets, the Ratha Yatra. A temple president runs each temple under a zonal secretary of the Governing Body Commission, and gives 1% of its income to the North American regional body. Money comes from the boxes, deity sponsorships at listed prices, festivals, and often a Govinda's restaurant; about half of temples have struggled financially. Most North American temples ended the old Life Membership some twenty years ago for patron programs; the game keeps a one-time life membership. ISKCON acknowledged abuse in its boarding schools of the 1970s and 1980s in 1998, and the former students' lawsuit was settled for $9.5 million in 2005. Practice varies by temple; separate sides of the temple room are customary rather than a rule.
4 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Arya Samaj
The Arya Samaj, the "society of the noble", a Hindu reform movement founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in Bombay in 1875: one formless God, whose highest name is Om; the four Vedas the only infallible scripture; no images, the Puranas set aside, and Rama and Krishna honoured as great men, not as God come down. Its ten principles are its charter. It worships around the fire. Each Sunday morning the samaj meets in a plain, carpeted hall with a havan kund at its centre and Om on the wall: Sandhya and the Gayatri mantra, the havan, with the week's sponsoring family seated at the kund and everyone chanting the Vedic mantras and offering ghee and herbs into the flames, bhajans, a sermon on a Vedic theme by the acharya or a visiting scholar, and lunch, given by the same family. With no deity to wake, dress or feed, there are no daily rites and no visitors coming for darshan; people come for the service and go home after lunch, and attendance is steady through a year of fewer, plainer festivals (Diwali above all, the night Dayananda died). The samskaras are its work, by the Vedic rites of his book: namings, the sacred thread (given to girls too), havans at home, and weddings, which couples of different castes, or none, seek out. Its priesthood is by learning, not birth, and women serve as priests. In America it's small, some forty to sixty samajs in two streams that rarely mix: North Indian (often Punjabi) samajs federated in the Arya Pratinidhi Sabha of America, founded in Detroit in 1991, and Indo-Caribbean, mostly Guyanese, samajs around New York, in the United Arya Samaj Federation; sermons are in Hindi at the first and in English at the second. Each samaj is independent, with an elected committee whose elections are fought over, and the wider bodies run conventions, camps and priests' training but direct no one. Education is its pride. Practice varies from samaj to samaj, and the research note marks what's unverified.
4 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Vedanta Society
A Vedanta Society: one of the American branches of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, whose headquarters is Belur Math near Kolkata, teaching the Vedanta of Sri Ramakrishna, Holy Mother Sarada Devi, and Swami Vivekananda, who founded the first society in New York in 1894 after the Parliament of the World's Religions. The Order counted fourteen branch centres in the United States in 2023. Each society is an independent, self-supporting nonprofit, but its swami, the Minister, is a monk of the Order sent by Belur Math and recallable by it: a society can't hire its own, and when an aged swami dies or is recalled, the next comes when the Order sends one. A board handles the money and the building; the swami, the teaching and the worship. The week centres on the Sunday lecture at eleven, in a chapel of chairs or pews facing the shrine of the three; the monks who live at the society keep the daily worship, and every evening there's vespers, the arati with its songs and then meditation. Vedanta presents itself as universal, accepting all religions as paths to one truth, so Christmas Eve (with readings from the Gospels and carols) and Easter are kept beside Durga Puja, Kali Puja at night, Buddha Purnima, and the birthdays of the three, reckoned by Belur Math's Bengali almanac and usually celebrated on the nearest Sunday. Membership is small and select: open by application to those who have attended for some time, after an interview with the swami; private mantra initiation is free. There are no fees for rites and no hundi: money comes from donations, the bookshop, and bequests, which built the larger societies. Societies don't advertise or seek converts. Monks lead the branches; in Southern California nuns of the Order, given sannyas since 1959, lecture too. Practice varies by society, in whether shoes come off, chairs or pews, and the shrine's images or pictures; there are no published figures for membership.
2 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Chinmaya Mission
A Chinmaya Mission center, of Chinmaya Mission West, the American body (incorporated in 1975) of the mission founded in India in 1953 for the followers of Swami Chinmayananda, teaching Advaita Vedanta through the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. It is a teaching mission more than a temple, and its heart is Bala Vihar: on Sunday mornings (Saturdays at some centers) through a school year from late August to May, after an assembly of chanting, bhajans and arati, the children learn the epics, values, chanting and the Gita in classes by grade taught by volunteer parents, while their parents study Vedanta with the center's acharya. North America counts over 18,000 Bala Vihar children; centers keep waitlists, and many still meet in rented schools. Belonging is by family: an annual membership (San Jose's, $350 a family for 2026-27) and fees for each child's classes. The acharya (a swami or swamini, a brahmachari or brahmacharini, or at some centers a married couple) is trained in the Mission's two-year course in Mumbai and posted by the Mission, not hired by the local committee; there are fewer acharyas than centers, so many share one, and as many women lead as men. Study groups and the women's Devi groups work through a set syllabus in homes, and a jnana yajna, a week of public lectures on a text, is the Mission's signature event. Nineteen of its 46 US centers have built a temple shrine with a presiding deity and a priest; the center as written has an altar in its satsang hall, and a center with a temple is a variant, with pujas asked for at listed prices. The year follows the school calendar and the Hindu festivals, with the Mission's own days, Chinmaya Jayanti and Gurudev's mahasamadhi. It doesn't seek converts. Its founder co-founded the Vishva Hindu Parishad in 1964 and was its first president. The weekend's shape is common practice rather than a fixed form, and what centers send to the Mission isn't published.
2 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Self-Realization Fellowship
A Self-Realization Fellowship temple: SRF, founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, with its Mother Center on Mount Washington in Los Angeles since 1925, teaching Kriya Yoga meditation through a line of gurus that begins with Jesus Christ and Krishna and ends with Yogananda. SRF doesn't call itself Hindu: among its aims is to reveal "the complete harmony and basic oneness of original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ and original Yoga as taught by Bhagavan Krishna"; it welcomes those of every faith, and its students needn't leave their own church. Scholars class it among the Hindu traditions, and the game lists it under Hinduism for that reason, with this note. SRF owns its eight American temples, seven of them in California, and assigns their ministers, monastics of the SRF Order, a Brother or a Sister; about 150 lay-led centers, groups and meditation circles meet in chapels and homes, a variant here, where a member conducts by reading Yogananda's words. The Sunday service at eleven is an hour of readings from Yogananda, chanting, silent meditation and prayer, with the Prayer Circle for healing and the minister's talk, in a quiet, church-like chapel with a Sunday school and sometimes a choir; there's little Hindu ritual, and no puja, murtis or priests. Members belong not to a temple but to the SRF Lessons, a home-study course of about nine months; the real commitment is Kriya Yoga initiation, asked for after about eight months of them. The year is on fixed Western dates, the gurus' births and mahasamadhis, Easter and Christmas, and above all the all-day Christmas meditation each December, begun by Yogananda in 1931. Temples charge for nothing: money comes from donations, the bookroom, the Lessons' suggested fees, and bequests. Monastics take no salary, and women have led the society as its president. SRF guards its name and teachings closely, and sued the breakaway Ananda in 1990. The pews, the lay centers' rules, and how Kriya is conferred in person today are less certain than the rest.
1 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →
Sri Sathya Sai Organization of USA
A Sathya Sai Center of the Sri Sathya Sai Organization of USA, part of the Sri Sathya Sai International Organization, devoted to Sri Sathya Sai Baba (1926-2011) of Puttaparthi in India. It describes itself as non-denominational, universal and "non-religious", not to be identified with any one religion: Sai Baba, it says, came to make the Christian a better Christian and the Hindu a better Hindu, and members needn't leave their own. Scholars describe the movement as Hindu, and most American members are of Indian origin, so the game lists it under Hinduism. The US organization reports over 200 centers in all fifty states, most meeting in members' homes or rented rooms; a center must incorporate if it owns a building, and a few have a hall of their own (a variant here). Its heart is the weekly devotional meeting, in America usually on a Thursday evening: bhajans sung line by line after a men's and a women's lead singer in turn, men on one side of the room and women on the other, a reading, silent meditation, and the Arathi, with vibhuti given as people leave. There are no clergy: the officers (a President, a Vice President, and coordinators of devotion, education and service) are selected by consensus, not elected, for two-year terms, and serve unpaid. There are no fees, no dues, and no fundraising of any kind ("fund collection is as much opposed to this movement as fire is to water"): anonymous gifts meet the costs, and projects wait until the money is there. Service, seva, is a third of the work, beside devotion and the children's Sai Spiritual Education; members, from eighteen, keep a Nine-Point Code that includes coming at least once a month. The center keeps no rites of passage, no weddings, mantras or funerals: members go to temples for those. The year is Sai Baba's own days, Guru Purnima and Shivaratri, Christmas and Buddha Purnima. The National Council accredits centers and can disaffiliate them. From 2000, allegations of sexual abuse against Sai Baba led many Western devotees to leave; the organization rejected them. How many centers own a hall isn't published.
0 required or forbidden in the building · services, rites, joining, giving, leaders and staff, life together, every item, and every factor →