Chittadhar Hṛdaya - The Epic of the Buddha His Life and Teachings

In 2009, with the initial publication of the English translation of Chittadhar Hdayas epic poem on the Buddhas life, Sugata Saurabha, cotranslator Subarna Man Tuladhar and I felt extraordinary satisfaction at fulfilling a promise made to the great author in what turned out to be our last meeting with him, at his home in 1982.

Even as the subsequent twenty-seven years passed by and many diversions intervened, we plugged away separately and in the limited periods when we could find sustained time together in Nepal, and then in 2000, when Subarna visited the United States. In truth, the poets sudden death was a great loss to us as translators. We had promised to do the English translation only after having been assured by the poet himself that he would help us complete this work by answering the many questions that we knew would arise. For who better, and without delay, could have clarified the hundreds of passages in this great and difficult work, where we were initially stumped, mystified, quizzical? In fact, until we got into the chapters, we had no way of knowing just how extraordinarily complicated and perplexing this multilayered work wasan epic in couplets produced by a literary genius over the course of five years. How many hundreds of hours did we spend consulting all the available Newari/Nepl Bh and Sanskrit dictionaries to extract the meaning of words and phrases that the poet composed and only from memory? (Not one was fully adequate to the task.) How frequently we felt bereft that we did not have the poet himself before us, the only person who could have solved our quandaries definitely! How sweet it would have been to sit at this mans feet and have his brilliant, erudite replies! Instead, we were left to do our best composing a translation, puzzling over his punctuation, wondering about the role of so many Sanskrit meters, and overall seeking how to grasp the authors intended interpretation of the Buddhas life. Many kinds of issues required digging into the text for clues as to the likely answers; others will, we suspect, never be known in full.

Our progress was slow as well because we faced the challenge of making the translation reflect the originals ornate, creative vivacity.

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Sugata Saurabha will provide subsequent scholars with many problems and puzzles to solve about the poet and his text. We tried to determine what the classical Indic textual references were in the early chapters and what his literary and other sources were for concocting the Buddhas biography during its prison genesis. In the other dimension of this masterpiece, it was also hard, in places, to make sense of the numerous references to archaic terms used for local Newar material culture, as Chittadhar wove these references into the text where the classical Buddhist sources are silent. In many places, we were left to surmise as best we could his views about matters central to interpretation; for example, how did he parse his loyalty to modern science, progressive ideology, and cultural advocacy for his Newar heritage? And then, since his literary papers and library were not carefully curated after his death, we had no way of reconstructing the basic facts scholars seek about the initial publication: What additions were made to the text after his release from prison? How much did he revise the manuscript before going to the press in Calcutta? What alterations to the manuscript were made at the press in correcting the page proofs? Many readers have been curious about how the context of the texts creationwritten while the Buddhist writer was imprisonedinfluenced the narrative and affected the author over the course of five years. (We did not know then about a serialized partial biography in Nepl Bh published by a local Kathmandu press in the 1960s, but it has even now eluded our search.) We hope that local scholars writing in Nepali and Nepl Bh who have pursued these mysteries will publish their studies for the global literary world that will now read Sugata Saurabha and want to know more. (We did not know then about a serialized partial biography in Nepl Bh published by a local Kathmandu press in the 1960s, but it has even now eluded our search.) We hope that local scholars writing in Nepali and Nepl Bh who have pursued these mysteries will publish their studies for the global literary world that will now read Sugata Saurabha and want to know more.

Other communities in the world would have found in Chittadhar not just a cultural hero who was worthy of a statue on a traffic circle or a day in an ethnic calendar celebrating his birthday but a genius who can stand with such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore, Haruki Murakami, or Lu Xun as one of the greatest writers of modern Asia. Like them, he should, and will, we hope, be the object of many types of academic study. To date, however, the Kavi-kesar (Lion among Poets) Chittadhar Hdaya is a fading memory in Nepal. Our hope is that all Newars and Nepalis will awaken to the realization that in Chittadhar Hdaya they have as their own one of the great literary figures of twentieth-century Asia. Not only that, they should understand that Sugata Saurabha deserves to be placed on the highest tier of compositions that present the Buddhas life, in all of Buddhist history. This second edition represents our attempt to relaunch this book on the world literature stage.

We took the opportunity of this new edition to clean up some errors in the first edition and to tweak the translation to read more clearly for a popular readership. This keeps our final promise to Chittadhar: when the poet sealed our commitment to translate his masterpiece into English, he asked that we prioritize the clarity of the story and the beauty in his epic above all else in our labor to render his lines into English. So this edition strives to generate the scale of recognition that