ROBBINSVILLE — In the Hindu religion, the strength of an elephant and beauty of a peacock combine to create harmony.
Featuring hundreds of each animal delicately carved into marble, a local Hindu temple hopes to become the source of harmony — physically and philosophically — for both devotees of the religion and members of the community in which it’s found.
With traditional shanti path, or peace hymns, the Robbinsville chapter of BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Sanstha officially dedicated its new temple, called a mandir, to the community yesterday. The ceremony, which drew thousands from across the country and the world, capped three years of construction on the structure, located off of North Main Street in Robbinsville.
“This will add to the cultural, moral, sculptural and architectural landscape in the community,” said Yogi Trivedi, a BAPS volunteer. “It will show that different isn’t bad, different is good. And, in many ways, different isn’t even different.”
“We may pray to different gods, but, in the end, we all want the same things for ourselves and our families,” he said. “We want to provide to the community a house of worship, and provide to devotees a place to learn how to service their community.”
With 108 ornately carved columns, equally complex ceiling work and mosaic stone floors, the mandir itself embodies an accord between the intricacy of its design and the serenity exuded by the white marble walls, he said.
The details of the structure — which is completely ensconced in a larger building to protect the delicate stone from harsh weather — further bridge time and geography, featuring religious figures and deities from across the centuries and from both northern and southern India.
Sculpted deities and religious figures cascade down white columns, laughing, dancing and leading lucky elephants to water. White peacocks look down from the tops of white archways.
Giving the eye no blank spaces to rest, the ceiling is a spiral of lotus flowers, bubbling up in three great domes, while below, a mosaic of colorful stone forms more flower designs. The carvings are lit from below, where small holes let beams of light through in groups of three at the base of each column.
A carving in the back of the temple even brings it to modern times. It portrays His Holiness Pramukh Swami Maharaj, a guru of the mandir, consecrating the murtis, or sacred statues, of the temple.
The process of building the mandir was also a practice in aligning different entities to a common goal. Nearly 3,000 volunteers donated 5 million hours to contribute to all aspects of its construction, from architectural design to artisanal details, Trivedi said.
That dedication stems from the importance of bhakti — or personal devotion — to the temple, an important aspect of Hinduism.
“This temple is more intricate, more complicated and more challenging than others like it, and perhaps the best of the best,” said BAPS volunteer Rohit Patel, whose company, Sachi Contractors, oversaw the building’s construction on a volunteer basis. “You feel so proud that you had a part of it. It’s a labor of love. When people see what we’re doing, they understand it’s not just any project.”
In fact, the temple is just one of six completely marble mandirs in all of North America. In accordance with ancient Hindu customs, no steel is used in its foundation.
An outdoor mandir currently under construction, made of limestone, will be even bigger. When complete in about 2021, the 162-acre complex would be, arguably, the largest comprehensive Hindu temple in the world.
From start to finish, the attention to detail was painstaking, Trivedi said, with experts in Italy running chemical tests on the marble to ensure the right type of stones were being used, to artisans in India, where the stone was carved, leaving no detail overlooked, down to toenails and trunk wrinkles. Once in America, the building was put together in layers, piece by piece, like a massive jigsaw puzzle, by the volunteers on the premises.
For those not as architecturally inclined, other opportunities to display one’s bhakti exist at the temple and adjoining community center. Hindu monks, or swamis, spend hours a day attending to the temple’s six murtis — waking the spiritual entities in the morning, feeding them breakfast and spending hours clothing them in elaborate traditional styles.
Others teach, cook or help organize events. Trivedi, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, will help welcome visitors to the center or even work in the kitchens, he said.
“No service here is too great or too small,” Trivedi said. “The person serving you water could be a doctor; the person parking your car could be a lawyer. Once inside, we are all the same. We are all devotees.”
BAPS members hope to extend that feeling of brotherhood to the surrounding community, as well, he said. Nestled between vast swaths of farmland, the complex also includes a large community and cultural center where classes ranging from religion to SAT preparation are taught. The center, finished in October 2012, also includes a gym and a multi-purpose room which has housed community blood drives and fundraisers and, just as it was completed, even refugees from the ravages of Hurricane Sandy.
One of the temple’s services to the community has been to stagger worship times to alleviate local traffic fears. A typical Sunday service draws between 700 to 1,000 visitors, Trivedi said. The local demand for a mandir was part of the reason the temple was built at this location, with devotees previously having to drive as far as Cherry Hill, Atlantic City or Philadelphia to be part of a temple.
The traffic was one issue raised by the community, which the BAPS members heard directly from recently during an open house event held for their direct Robbinsville neighbors. Another concern raised by a neighbor was the noise created during the three-year long construction process, Trivedi said.
Still, Trivedi hopes that with the temple now finished, it can provide harmony to quell those apprehensions as well.
“We apologized for the noise once we heard that,” he said. “But once he came in, and he saw the temple, and he saw what we were doing, he told us, ‘Make as much noise as you want. Please keep up construction. This is so beautiful.’