The Centrality Of Temples
Like the Hindu religion itself, the Hindu temple is able to absorb and encompass everyone. It never says you must worship in this way, or you must be silent because there is a ceremony in progress. It accepts all, rejects none. It encourages all to come to God and does not legislate a single form of devotion. Hindus always want to live near a temple, so they can frequent it regularly. People arbitrate their difficulties in the vicinity of the temple. The Hindu people treat the temple very seriously and also very casually. It’s a formal-informal affair. Between pūjās, some may sit and talk and chat while others are worshiping. You might even find two people having a dispute in the temple, and the Deity is the arbitrator of their quarrel, giving clarity of mind on both sides.
Each Hindu temple throughout the world has its own rules on how to proceed and what to do within it. In some temples, in fact most temples in South India, all the men are required to take off their shirts and enter bare-chested. However, if you are in a business suit in the South Indian temple in New York, that’s all right. You are not required to take off your shirt. Every temple has its own rules, so you have to observe what everybody else is doing the first time you go.
Hinduism is the most dynamic religion on the planet, the most comprehensive and comprehending. The Hindu is completely filled with his religion all of the time. It is a religion of love. The common bonds uniting all Hindus into a singular spiritual body are the laws of karma and dharma, the belief in reincarnation, all-pervasive Divinity, the ageless traditions and our Gods. Our religion is a religion of closeness, one to another, because of the common bond of loving the same Gods. All Hindu people are a one family, for we cannot separate one God too far from another. Each in His heavenly realm is also of a one family, a divine hierarchy which governs and has governed the Hindu religion from time immemorial, and will govern Sanātana Dharma on into the infinite.
Hinduism was never created, never founded as a religion. Therefore, it can never end. Until the Persians attached the name Hindu to those people living east of the river Indus, and the name Hinduism later evolved to describe their religious practices, this ancient faith bore a different title—the Sanātana Dharma, the Eternal Truth. The understanding was that within every man the germ or cell of his total affinity with God exists as the perennial inspiration of his spiritual quest and wellspring of all revelation. This enduring sense of an ever-present Truth that is God within man is the essence of the Sanātana Dharma. Such an inherent reality wells up lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, unfolding the innate perfection of the soul as man comes more fully into the awakened state of seeing his total and complete oneness with God.