the hindu community with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu (ep 3, 26).

Inside the Hindu temple of Northwest Arkansas on Regional Airport Boulevard in Bentonville, Monica Kumar leads a conversation with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu, the temple's chief priest, whom his community calls Swamiji. Born into a family of priests in Hyderabad and trained under Sri Chinna Jeeyar Swami, he came to Tulsa in 2001 to serve a new temple there and began driving to Bentonville most weekends the following year, when the local community was perhaps a hundred and fifty families praying in each other's homes. He moved here for good in 2012, the year this building opened. The conversation opens with a Sanskrit prayer and moves through what the Vedas hold as their most basic teaching, why many teachers in his tradition set aside the word Hindu altogether, what a temple gives a community that home worship cannot, and why the sound of Om is understood to make the whole universe answer. Swamiji tells the stories behind Holi and Deepavali as his tradition tells them, describes the temple's blood drives and food collections for the wider region, and explains what he means when he says there are many paths and no conflict between them. Asked the two questions every season three guest is asked, he speaks about what his tradition teaches in a time of clashing perspectives and offers a definition of wholeness that begins with the soul and ends with how we see one another. This episode sits in the season's fourth movement, what is emerging, and asks what a place gains when a community decides to make a piece of ground holy on purpose. https://www.theunderview.com/the-hindu-community-with-sriman-ubhaya-vedanta-venugopala-swami-gattu-northwest-arkansas-bentonville About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch