Bird of Passage

October 2024 Suffolk
October 2004 Kathmandu

I would not have recognised the anniversary had Amy not come to visit and asked about my connection with Nepal? That question was not in my current Suffolk orbit, so I had to stop and think and to help me I pointed to a poster I’d had framed next to the fireplace. Here, I said, and as I looked I saw, it was exactly 20 years ago, to the date, that we, Sugata and I launched the book with the exhibition in Patan Museum, Kathmandu: October 16th 2004. How I met Amy, randomly in the Town Park of Halesworth is another story, and both of us felt the serendipity of that moment.

To reflect on this, I’m gathering some of the strands of that story into this web page, picking it out of the original baobabs web page where it resided since the start, 20 years ago.

Back cover

Sugata, whose story this is, was born in 1911 in Germany. His long life has been an odyssey through his own and the last century’s dark ages. He railed against his time and place, a protest that culminated in his war-time betrayal of Nazi Germany, when he risked his life and effectively ensured his rootlessness. His search for root as well as freedom took him to the East, first to India and then Nepal where he became a Buddhist monk. Returning to live in his adopted country, Norway, he gave lectures evangelising Buddhism, and at the same time he slowly began the process of unravelling the suffering of his past life, an unravelling that continues to this day.

Aged 93, Sugata is still travelling to the East, attending retreats, and climbing mountains; despite a parallel desire to detach himself, he is fully engaged in examining life.

Rachel Kellett was born in England in 1957, the year Sugata returned from the East to the West. She met Sugata at her first Buddhist retreat in India in 1998 and travelled with him for three years, retracing his steps, writing this book with him.