Swami Tirtha
The film is drawn from Axis of Life, a novel by Swami Tirtha — teacher, researcher of spiritual traditions, and the voice behind the story’s pilgrimage.
Swami Tirtha is the pen name of Géza László Rácz, born in Budapest in 1959. He lives in a small ashram in the Hungarian countryside — a secluded farmstead that once housed a farm school — where he teaches, writes, and studies the spiritual traditions of East and West.
His path began in his mid-twenties, in economics. Asking who the subject of the economic dimension of life might be, he arrived at the human being; asking after the essence of the human being, he arrived at the soul. The search led him to the practice of bhakti yoga and, in time, to his own teacher. He has followed an ascetic life since — no house of his own, the world for a home, and a wide spiritual family in place of one founded.
His days are unhurried and full: lectures and study, translation, the editing of a journal, the garden, firewood. The translation is a scholar’s — a complete Vedánta-sútra rendered from the Sanskrit (2010), and a hand in the 1,251-page Sanskrit–Hungarian explanatory dictionary (2020). It is the register of his writing as well — the Vedic canon quoted beside Christian mystics, Greek philosophers and Sufi poets, no claim to mastery, and a preference for the question that stays open over the answer that closes.
Bulgaria has held a place in his life for three decades. He returns often; in 2025 he accompanied the Bulgarian edition of The Black Book through Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas.
“I believe the spiritual dimension of wisdom is the ability to love.”
Axis of Life
The novel behind the film: a pilgrimage in which a spiritual master must choose his successor, and the inner journey it becomes. First published in Hungarian as Élettengely (2013); in Bulgarian as Оста на живота (Kalpataru).
shop.kalpataru.eu →The Black Book — Meditations for Every Day
366 daily meditations, one for each day, set on the calendar of the zodiac. Written in Hungarian (Ludas-tó, 2022); Bulgarian edition by Kalpataru (2024).
chernata-kniga.com →- Náma — A beavatás szentsége (2025)
On the holy Names and initiation, told between an old master and a young student.
- Az Arany szútrák (2007)
The Golden Sutras: aphorisms alongside the Hansakunda-upanishad. Bulgarian edition, 2019.
- Vedánta-sútra (2010)
A complete Hungarian translation from the Sanskrit — 622 pages of the Brahma-sutras with commentary.
- Szanszkrit–magyar értelmező szótár (2020)
A 1,251-page Sanskrit–Hungarian explanatory dictionary; one of three credited translators.
- Intés a tanítványhoz (2005)
The Bulgarian master Peter Deunov, edited and rendered into Hungarian.
For more than thirty years he has edited Kagylókürt, a Hungarian journal of metaphysics.