keynote speaker was the then Lieutenant Governor Goodwin Knight who addressed some 1,500 attendees, including Oscar Gavrilovich (Council General of Yugoslavia in New York) and a number of other foreign dignitaries. Within the first eight months of its opening, ten thousand people had visited the site. Sri Yogananda had remarked that the location reminded him of Kashmir, and had described within the Autobiography of a Yogi some of the landscaped features and flora cultivated onsite: On March 6, 1952, the day before his passing, Paramahansa Yogananda and a group of monks participated in what was to become known as the Guru's "Last Supper", where for over an hour Sri Yogananda chanted "Light the Lamp of Thy Love" while playing the organ. A number of improvements have occurred on the property in the ensuing years, including: the construction of the main temple upon the southern bluff overlooking the lake (in 1996), construction of the monastics' ashram and retreat (1997), the purchase of the adjoining Santa Ynez Transcendental Meditation (TM) property (1998), the addition of a steel structure and copper roof over the Gandhi peace memorial (2002), the renovation of the Lake Shrine Court of Religions, entrance gate (2003), and the houseboat (2007); and the restoration of the Windmill Chapel (2015). Features Gandhi Shrine The Lake Shrine is home for the Mahatma Gandhi World Peace Memorial. Originally designed by Paramahansa Yogananda as a "wall-less temple", it was erected in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, the architect of India's freedom through nonviolent means. Along the southern lakeshore, surrounding a semicircular portion of the memorial area stands the golden lotus archway, which is crowned at the center with a massive ellipsoidal pinnacle that is flanked by two large lotuses (with two additional smaller ellipsoidal fixtures on the outermost edges atop the structure); each constructed of copper coated with a golden varnish. The focal point of the memorial is a thousand-year-old stone sarcophagus from China, in which a portion of Gandhi's ashes are encased in a brass and silver coffer. The sarcophagus is flanked by two statues of Guanyin. The ashes had been sent to Yogananda by an old friend, Dr. V.M. Nawle, a publisher and journalist from Pune, India. Following the dedication of the memorial, Dr. Nawle wrote: For some, enshrining Gandhi's ashes at the Lake Shrine is controversial since the Hindu cremation ritual ends with immersion of the ashes in water. One report states