Shri Kailashpati Mandir — A Temple Raised From the Ground It Stands On
The crown came before the building. In 2017 my teacher, Swami Satyadharma Saraswati, put a kalaśa into my hands — copper, its discs stacked like the segments of a spine, the finial set on the roof of a sacred house. It was her own sacred artefact, given away. She said, “that’s for your Yoga Shala.” I had no hall to put it on. Our house had burned at the end of 2015, and we were living on the property in a tipi.
The tipi became the teaching space; we moved into an old garage with no windows. Life asks only that you keep moving your feet, one in front of the other — and then the right people and materials arrive. We named what rose Shri Kailashpati Mandir, the house of Shiva: Kailāsapati, lord of Kailāsa. In March 2022 a grant from the Yoga for Good Foundation carried it to a working state.
— Atharva Veda 12.1.12 (Pṛthivī Sūkta)
माता भूमिः पुत्रोऽहं पृथिव्याः । पर्जन्यः पिता स उ नः पिपर्तु ॥
mātā bhūmiḥ putro’haṃ pṛthivyāḥ | parjanyaḥ pitā sa u naḥ pipartu
Earth is the mother, and I am the son of the earth; Parjanya, the rain-cloud, is the father — may he fill us.
June 2021
January 2022
February 2022
March 2022
July 2022
September 2022
November 2022
December 2022
February 2023
April 2023
What the Mud Knows
The walls went up as mud mix — subsoil, sand, straw, water, hands. This is not a rustic flourish. UNESCO’s World Heritage Earthen Architecture Programme puts it plainly: about a third of the world’s people live in houses built wholly or partly of earth. It is the most widely used building material on earth, and the least discussed — dug where it is needed, unfired, unshipped. Reviewing cob in 2016 for Building and Environment, Erwan Hamard and colleagues put its environmental cost at a fraction of conventional walling. And when an earthen building is finally let go, it does not become rubble — it goes back to being ground.
The building makes the argument better than any sentence. A wall of earth is borrowed, held in a shape a while, returned; so is a body. Practice is what you do with the interval. To raise a temple out of the soil it stands on is to say with your hands what the breath already says on its own: nothing here is owned, and not one measure of it need be wasted.
The kalaśa sits on the roof now. Inside, the hall holds practice; outside, the mandira holds the community that built it. What is worth carrying away is not the building but the arithmetic under it: most of what you need already lies beneath your feet, and the rest is the willingness to keep moving them for years before anything shows. Whatever you are living in tonight — a rented room, a windowless garage — the ground beneath it is the same ground.
From the Build — A Handful of the Wall
Find bare subsoil — under a garden bed, or a bank cut by a path. Take a handful, wet it, work it between your palms until it holds. Add sand if it cracks, dry grass if it crumbles. Roll it into a ball, dry it in the sun a day, then try to break it. Your hands will learn more about what a house is in ten minutes than in a season of reading.
References
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, World Heritage Earthen Architecture Programme (WHEAP). The source of the estimate that roughly one third of the world’s population lives in dwellings built wholly or partly of earth.
- Erwan Hamard, Bogdan Cazacliu, Andry Razakamanantsoa and Jean-Claude Morel, “Cob, a vernacular earth construction process in the context of modern sustainable building,” Building and Environment 106 (2016): 103–119.
- Atharva Veda 12.1.12, from the Pṛthivī Sūkta (Hymn to the Earth), Book XII, Hymn 1 — the longest sustained address to the earth in the Vedic corpus.
Editor’s note, 2026. This chronicle is published at its original date, April 2023, and is left as it was written. Shri KailashPati Mandir has since been demolished. The photographs stay as the record of what was built, and of how many hands built it. Earth returns to earth; the walls of this temple were always made of the ground they stood on. That was true while it rose, and it is true now. — Matri, 2026
