Dharwad, India, 4 January 2014: A temple in the Southern Indian state of Karnataka
has a unique tradition of worshipping the Bible, reports India’s leading newspaper
The Hindu. Priests at the Ajata Nagalingaswami temple in Navalgund town of
Dharwad district offer flowers and ‘arti’ and light oil lamps before a copy of the
Bible. Nagalingaswamy, a yogi who lived in the 19th century, is the presiding deity
in the temple.
Temple head Veerendra Swami said that the copy of the Bible
in Kannada was published by a Committee of the Missionaries of Germans, London, and
Wesleyan Missionary Societies, and printed at Mangalore in 1865.
Swami has
an interesting story to relate about the origin of the temple. Kallappa, from Mushtigeri
village of Bagalkot district, was a devotee of the mother goddess. A group of Christian
missionaries gave him a copy of the Bible.
Once when Nagalingaswami came to
meet Kallappa, he hid the book from the yogi for some reason. However, in the course
of their conversation, Nagalingaswami told him about his next birth and asked Kallappa
to show him the Bible.
The yogi pulled out a hook and drilled a hole in the
book. He then dropped a Victorian silver coin into the hole, which came out from the
other end. Nagalingaswami told Kallappa that he would take the rebirth when the hole
filled on its own over a period of time.
The story is part of the biography
of the yogi published by the temple. Swami claimed that the hole had been shrinking
over a period of time and the missing words on the perforated part had reappeared.
The temple authorities have been recording the radius of this hole regularly.
One
can see circular lines around the hole, which the temple authorities drew at different
point in time. Anyone can access the Bible with prior permission before the morning
puja. Even a ‘panja’ and a ‘sidgi’ brought here by the mystic have been preserved
here. Source: The Hindu