Shree Meenananda Foundation
A house in the fields
The temple stands in the fields. It was built so that Tantra could be studied and practised as a complete life — ritual, song, knowledge, and service — rather than as a rumour or a spectacle.
The Ashram stands in Gopikantapur, beside Kopai in Birbhum, West Bengal — a white shrine with a tall shikhara in the paddy. Sri Meenananda Tirthanath and Guruma Minakshi Devyomba built it so that Tantra and other religious education could be received in a living house, not only in books or rumours.
The older website called the Foundation a tree of spiritual lineage. That image is kept. What has become clearer, as the house has grown, is that the roots are ritual and the branches are social: feeding, clothing, teaching, tending cows, and keeping kirtan in the evening air.
Purpose
Tantra, in the teaching offered here, does not ask a person to despise the body or abandon the world. The Divine permeates body, mind, nature, relationship, and ordinary work. Awakening is the disciplined seeing of that fact. Desire, fear, and limitation are not trophies and not enemies; they are material to be turned toward wisdom and compassion, until the sense of a sealed individual self begins to open into the larger consciousness it was never separate from.
Values
Honesty of speech. Hospitality without display. A shrine kept clean. Music that is sung, not sold as a miracle. Service that does not photograph people as objects of pity. No promise of siddhi, wealth, or cure is made in the name of the Ashram.
The environment
Fields, a night path strung with lights, a pond, and a shrine room in which homa is kindled before Maa. Visitors should expect a working religious house, not a resort. Hours and overnight stay have not been published as a public timetable — please telephone.
Present work
Daily evening kirtan (subject to confirmation). Puja and tithi observances, including Kali Puja. Documented clothing distribution on Guruma’s advent tithi. Community prasad. Gau seva as a continuing care of the Ashram’s cows. Teachings, kirtan, and the album Charan Dasi on the official YouTube channel.
Long vision
The Foundation’s published social responsibilities — education, medical camps, a wider culture of wellbeing — are treated on this site as a mixture of living work, stated intention, and future programmes. We do not describe an aspiration as if it were already a finished institution.
The main temple, Gopikantapur.
The approach after dark.