This poem belongs of the little-known Newari (Nepal Bhasha) language and literature, specifically to its even less known Buddhist version. It is one of the very rare cases that works in Newari language appear outside Nepal.

In nineteen long cantos, the "Sugata Saurabha" tells of the life of the Buddha, following the traditional accounts, but situates it in the strongly local context of Newar and Nepali Buddhism. It emulates the classical (Kavya) style of the long-standing Indian tradition, and has been inspired by the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit poem, the "Buddhacarita," Consequently, the poet inserts stanzas composed in traditional classical Sanskrit meter, though written in polished Newari.

The poem was composed by the greatest modern writer in Newari language, Chittadhar Hrdaya (1906- 1982), while he was imprisoned by the autocratic strongly pro-Hindu Rana regime that governed Nepal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

The poem is the best-known work of the flowering of modern Newari literature that emerged after the restrictions of the Rana regime were lifted in 1950.

A twentieth-century account of the life of the Buddha, presented in a fascinating form, with an incredible story behind it.

This book contains the English translation of "The Sweet Fragrance of the Buddha," a beautiful, devotional epic poem that portrays the major events in the Buddha's life from birth to death. Chittadhar Hrdaya, a master poet from Nepal, wrote it while in prison in the 1940s, smuggling it out over time on pieces of paper. Hrdaya's verses create a sense of a magical environment in which clouds, trees, flowers, and the buzzing of bees all reflect and evoke the full range of emotions, from erotic love to anger to heroism to compassion and peace, experienced by the young prince Siddhartha, as well as by his father, mother, wife, and son. By showing how the central events of the Buddha's life are experienced from different people's viewpoints, the poem communicates a fuller and deeper sense of the humanity of everyone involved and the depth of the Buddha's loving-kindness for all beings. This English translation captures the beauty and flow of the original, and the volume supplements the translation with short essays that both explain the Indic poetry conventions that Hrdaya employed and provide the political backstory behind the author's imprisonment.