How the Funds Are Used

How Your 2023 Donations Were Used

Last year’s Digital Dharma Drive contributions totaling $88,560 were allocated toward a variety of projects, including web improvements, digital assets, e-books, and major translations, with ten percent set aside for a permanent Digital Dharma Drive Endowment that, in the far future, will replace this annual fundraising effort. Here are the highlights of the team’s accomplishments in 2024:

Himalayan Academy Website and Online Books
Our monks have completed rebuilt version of our Himalayan Academy website. This website has been around for about three decades and has accumulated aa great deal of online content. So as you can imagine, rebuilding it is a major task. Apart from the main website structure, we rebuilt our databases and combined both proprietary and some custom code in order to encompass:

And much more, including resources you might already be familiar with such as our curated repository of scripture translations, or general, but comprehensive, information about Kauai Aadheenam itself.

Hinduism Today Website Development
After having completed out Hinduism Today website, our monks have been diving into the archives to visually enrich past issues and each quarter, a new issue of the magazine must be created, prepared for the web, converted into ebook formats, and the images and articles meticulously uploaded and entered by our team. Despite facing national difficulties, our team in Russia continued their remarkable work in translating, formatting, printing and distributing the magazine (with impressive production values) in Russian language.

Monks’ Documentary
When Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami recently sent Yoginathaswami and Tejadevanatha to Singapore and Malaysia on a several-week mission to inspire youth, we mobilized our resources and created a 22-minute film shown during numerous youth seminars. The film aimed to inform audiences about the monastery and maybe even inspire potential monk candidates. Producing the film was a significant project for our newest Brahmachari from Malaysia, Sivanadiyar Kodiswara, who has a background in videography. See it here.

Web Development and Maintenance
Funds are regularly allocated to web services and hosting platform costs. For example, paying for our developer certification for distribution on Apple’s app store, or paying for the servers that run our websites. Other under-the-hood services include powerful caching plugins to help with site speed (important for sites with as much content as ours), as well as our CDN service—a robust content delivery network that maintains our sites’ resources on servers all over the world. So if someone tries to download a piece of artwork in Chennai, it’s served to them from a server down the street, rather than one all the way in California.

Bodhinatha’s Translation of the Yoga Sutras
Thanks to your support, we invested substantial effort into creating ten masterpieces of art for our upcoming Yoga Sutras book, scheduled for release next year. This is a challenging work due to its Sanskrit foundations, with which we have limited familiarity. However, with the help of ChatGPT’s expertise in Sanskrit, we’ve used DDD funds to subscribe to professional AI services we access nearly every day.

AI Services
ChatGPT has been assisting us with proofreading, document summaries, art creation (we’re working on a series of eight portraits of our Satgurus), linguistic questions and translations, fact-checking, research, article planning, app and web coding and much, much more.

One of our major achievements has been the implementation of Gurudeva’s cloned voice. In the 1990s, Gurudeva began a project to record the Master Course lessons in his own voice, but he completed only about 20% of the Trilogy. Now, based on these recordings, we have created an authentic-sounding digital voice (following years of pre-AI attempts), which we are using to generate recordings of the entire Master Course Trilogy. A professional in North India is working daily on this project, which we expect to complete next year, giving seekers audiobook access to the entire body of work. You can sign up for the daily lessons here.

Saint Tayumanavar Project
Work continued on translating the devotional songs of Saint Tayumanavar (1706-1744) into approachable English. Tayumanavar, a prolific spiritual poet of South India beloved by Ramana Maharishi and often quoted by Yogaswami, presents Vedanta/Siddhanta in a seminal, powerful, and profound way. His 1,454 Tamil poems were translated into English by Dr. B. Natarajan in the 1980s as a gift to Gurudeva. Over the past year, our editing team has refined his work in consultation with Tamil scholars. The completed book will feature the Tamil original, Dr. Natarajan’s biographical introduction, and an extensive commentary by Father Thomas from his 1989 Master’s thesis. Kerala muralist Suresh Muthukulam, one of India’s top artists, has provided ten exquisite canvases for the book, which we plan to print in 2025, likely using Amazon’s new on-demand digital publishing services. We are also collaborating with a talented Oduvar in India to record the saint’s songs in traditional style (with Tamil and English versions as our ambitious goal).

Saiva Atmartha Puja
The home puja for initiates has been upgraded and is now available on our new website (for our initiates only). We had the chants proofread by Sanskrit scholars and converted the Devanagari text to Unicode so it’s compatible with all platforms. This year, we plan to add audio files for this puja and other chants.

Miscellaneous
We sent thousands of pages of historical documents and research papers to India, where a team is scanning, proofreading, and OCRing them. Once hidden in filing cabinets, these documents will soon be searchable on our server. This brings us closer to completing the digitization of our physical library.

ProQuest
We maintained our agreement with ProQuest to distribute Himalayan Academy’s books digitally worldwide, providing reliable and curated sources of information to researchers, libraries, universities and government institutions.

Jai Ganesha!

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