Sugata Saurabha (epic)

He was given a six-year jail sentence for writing a poem in his mother tongue, which the autocratic Rana regime sought to suppress.

[2] Hridaya wrote Sugata Saurabha in secret in prison, and his sister Moti Laxmi Upasika would smuggle out the scraps of paper on which he had scribbled the verses when she brought him his food.

The life story is based on classical sources, but Hridaya has filled in details from the Nepalese sociocultural context where they are not mentioned.

The epic has been described as providing an aesthetically pleasing and doctrinally sound comprehensive account of the Buddha's life,[3] and a magnum opus in Nepal Bhasa literature.

Artist Chandra Man Singh Maskey, who was in jail with Hridaya for alleged political activities, did the color illustrations in Sugata Saurabha.

In 2010, Oxford University Press published an English translation by Todd T. Lewis and Subarna Man Tuladhar.

[7] Lewis and Tuladhar won the 2011 Toshihide Numata Book Prize awarded by the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for their translation of the epic.