Vaiṣṇava · Śaiva · Śākta

Pandit Sahadev

A Vedic priest based in Austria, serving Hindu families across Europe, formed in three streams of the tradition and shaped by twenty-five years of service at the altar.

I am Pandit Sahadev. I live in Austria and am attached to Radha Govinda Math in Traiskirchen, and from there I serve Hindu families across Europe who wish to mark the passages of their lives as their forebears did. I conduct the rites of the Vedic and Āgamic tradition: weddings, the consecration of homes, the naming and the rites of childhood, the worship and the fire offerings, the readings of the chart, and, when the time comes, the rites that close a life and remember the dead. I write this page so that those considering entrusting such moments to me may know something of who I am and how I came to this work, for in our tradition a priest is rightly known before he is engaged.

How I Came to This

I was not born into this tradition. I came to it as a European, and the question of how that happened is usually the first thing people want to ask me, so let me answer it plainly.

It began in 1996, when I was initiated into the meditation practice of the movement founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For two years I practiced the mantras and the meditation given there, and something in it held me. What had begun as a discipline became a question: where did these practices come from, and what was the whole of which they were a part. That question led me, in 1998, to ISKCON, and from there deeper into the Vaiṣṇava tradition.

In 1999 I was serving at a temple in Slovenia, and in that year I met my Gurudeva, Śrī Śrīmad Bhakti Vaibhava Purī Gosvāmī Mahārāja of Odisha, and received initiation from him. He left this world on the third of March, 2009. Whatever I am able to offer at an altar, I received first from him, and the years since have been an attempt to keep faith with what he gave.

Three Streams, One Practice

The Sanātana tradition is not a single river but a confluence, and over the years I have been given initiation in three of its streams. Each came from a different teacher, in a different place, and each formed a different faculty in me. They meet in one practice, the way three rivers meet and flow on as one water.

The Vaiṣṇava initiation of 1999, from my Gurudeva, is the root of everything else. From it I received Bhakti, devotion, and with it the understanding that the rites are not mechanisms to be operated but offerings to be made with love, and that the heart of the officiant is as much a part of the rite as his hands and his voice.

The Śaiva initiation came in 2013, in India, from Jagadguru Śaṅkarācārya Śrī Nischalananda Saraswati of Govardhana Maṭha at Puri, the seat Ādi Śaṅkarācārya established on the eastern shore. If the first stream gave me devotion, this one gave me discipline and the clear metaphysical vision behind the forms: the one reality that the many rites and names point toward, and the austerity of mind that keeps a priest honest about what he is doing and why.

The Śākta initiation, in the discipline of Śrī Vidyā, came from 2018 onward, received in South India from gurus of a lineage descending unbroken from Durvāsā Muni. From this stream I received the sense of the living power within the rite: the recognition that the sacred is not a distant abstraction but a present and active presence, the Mother who is invoked and who responds. It is the stream that keeps worship from becoming dry recitation. Of Śrī Vidyā itself I say little in public, as its practice asks, and I do not name the teachers who gave it.

Devotion from the first, clarity from the second, living power from the third: three gifts, carried into one altar.

Chennai, 2017

Of all the ceremonies I have taken part in, one stands apart. In 2017, in Chennai, I attended a Chandi Homam of a scale I had not seen before, conducted by priests whose command of the rite was of an order I had no measure for. What happened there is difficult to set down in ordinary language, and I will not try to dress it up. It was a mystical experience, and what followed from it, the effects and the blessings that came in its wake, opened the door to Śrī Vidyā for me the following year.

I mention it because it explains something about how I understand this work. My third initiation did not come from study or from seeking it out. It came because a rite, conducted properly and at full strength by those qualified to conduct it, does what the tradition says it does. Having been on the receiving end of that, I find it hard to treat any ceremony as a formality.

The Years and the Temples

For some twenty-five years I have served as a pujari, and that service has carried me across many countries: Slovenia, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Ireland, India, and the United States. Temple service is a particular discipline. It is daily, exacting, and largely unseen; one rises before the community, prepares the worship, and offers it whether many are watching or none. Those years at the altar are where what my teachers gave me became, through repetition, second nature.

Since 2009 I have served at Radha Govinda Math in Traiskirchen, Austria, where I am the pandit in charge of ceremonies. That temple is where I am settled and the ground from which I travel to the families who call me. A glimpse of some of these ceremonies may be found in the gallery of ceremonies.

How a Ceremony Takes Shape

Every engagement begins the same way: I listen. Each family carries its own tradition, the customs of its region, the deity its line has long held dear, the way its elders remember the rite being done. From what a family tells me, I shape the ceremony: the essential acts kept whole and in their proper order, the Mantras spoken fully and accurately, and the surrounding arrangements fitted to the venue, the hours available, and the people present.

During the ceremony I explain as we go. I conduct and explain in English, German, and Croatian, so that a grandmother who has seen the rite a hundred times and a colleague attending their first Hindu ceremony can both follow what is happening and why it matters. This takes nothing from the sanctity of the rite; it opens the rite to those living through it, which is what the rite is for.

Where I Serve

From Austria I serve the Austrian, German, Slovakian, and Croatian communities directly. Italy and its lake country lie just across the Alps, and France, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are each a brief flight away. Over the years the ceremonies have taken me to all of these and beyond, to island weddings in the Aegean, house blessings in Alpine valleys, and naming ceremonies in the great cities of the north. The fuller account of how the tradition travels, and why it holds its full validity far from its source, is set out in the page on the Vedic pandit serving Europe.

I keep this verse close, because it holds the three streams of my own formation in a single image. Vaiṣṇava devotion, Śaiva clarity, Śākta power: not three destinations but three waters of one ocean, and a priest given all three is asked only to carry them faithfully, without confusion and without pride, to the families who need them.

If you are considering a ceremony for your family, a wedding, a naming, the blessing of a home, the worship of a festival, or the rites for one who has passed, an unhurried conversation about what the rite requires is where the work properly begins. I will tell you honestly what the rite asks, and whether I am the right person to perform it for you.

I was given this tradition by my teachers. What remains of my work is to give it on, faithfully, to those who ask.

The traditions named on this page are the subject of sustained academic study, notably through the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, with the primary Vedic texts available in translation at WisdomLib.