During the 2019 May Call celebration at Mount Shasta, California, Master Kumar launched a revised English version of the thrilling biography of Sripada Srivallabha. Sripada is an avatar of Lord Dattatreya who was born in Pithapuram, India, in 1320 AD. The book has been published by Kulapati Editions of WTT Germany. They had already published the German version end of 2016. At that time, I had brought it to the temple at Sripada’s birthplace. Now, I wanted to hand over to them the new English version, together with the friends who had done the publishing work.
I first intended to go just with a small group, but finally 26 group members were sitting in the bus which started 31 December early morning from Visakhapatnam.
At Pithapuram, the bus had to stop at a distance of some hundred metres from the temple, for it is located in a quarter with only very small streets. Read more about it here.
The hall of the temple was filled with people sitting in rows before the inner shrine, where some priests were conducting a ritualistic worship of the “Padukas”, the symbolic sandals of the feet of Sripada. The ceremony was projected on TV-screens placed at the roof besides the shrine, while the rhythmic vibrations of the Vedic chanting resounded through the air. I had announced our coming via e-mail, and though I had got multi-language publishing rights for the West some years ago, I wondered how they would receive the new book, since it was a version done by fusing and editing three existing English versions. I thought, let’s wait and see things develop.
After a while, the ritual came to a close, coconut water was sprinkled over the group as a blessing and some sweet curd from the ritual was distributed with a spoon. Our group remained seated while the big group slowly dispersed.
Some priests came to us, asked questions, and we started singing some mantrams – which caused a smiling interest. I told to some people that I would like to hand over the new English edition, and this caused a stir. The head of the temple approached and full of joy and gratitude hold the book. I explained what we had done – the photos, the footnote explanations, the register of persons, the introduction etc. – and he immediately asked if they could publish the book by themselves and if they could get the PDFs. Yes – everything is for free download on the web, with multi-lingual explanations… It was a very solemn moment, standing there in front of the shrine in the energy around statues of Lord Dattatreya, Sripada and his following incarnation as Narasimha Saraswathi. Photos were taken, thanks exchanged and then the entire group of Westerners sat on the steps in front of the temple for some group pictures.
Later, we visited the place of Go Seva – cow worship – which is part of the temple compound. It was very nice to stand there with the cows looking at us with their deep eyes…
Afterwards, the bus brought us to the Kukkuteswara temple where there is an old lingam worshipped as a self-manifested form of Dattatreya and some other deities around – a temple dedicated to Shiva and Parvathi, a temple of different forms of the Divine Mother. In one shrine room, there were statues of several incarnations of Dattatreya.
Later, we started on our journey back to Visakhapatnam, with a short lunch stop at a restaurant. We all very joyful and felt much blessed of having been at this very sacred and magnetic places.