Ralph Thorpe
Novelist and traveller, painter and historian, Ralph (Hari) Thorpe gave up a meteoric business career, during which he wrote Test Marketing for Profit, aged 25, to see the world and seek the meaning of Life.
Back-packing from London to Japan, he spent a year in Italy, visiting every cultural site with inexhaustible energy. He climbed Mount Olympus in Greece, was arrested by the Israeli Water Police for swimming across the Lake of Galilee, stopped by the Secret Police from joining a Persian nomadic tribe for their spring migration, got stoned with rocks in a Mosque in Afghanistan, and he cycled across India, where he bowed to a naked guru seated on a tiger skin.
From Madras, where he was born, Hari sailed east on a cargo ship; it got caught in a typhoon in the China Sea but reached Japan safely - two other ships he sailed on were to sink: one, the square-rigger SS Marques, in the Bermuda Triangle.
Hari has spent many years in the Orient, immersing himself in the main cultures and religions - meeting farmers and fishermen, generals and mayors, princesses and bargirls, Sumo wrestlers, writers, Sufi mystics and Indian gurus, Shinto priests and Zen Masters.
He lived in Hamajima, a Japanese fishing village near the Grand Shrine of Ise, for four years. This became the background for his novel, The Dreamer, sub-titled A Voyage of Self-Discovery.
Hari speaks a little of many languages, from GCSE Latin to 'achoo!' - 'thanks' in Lithuanian. He is able to read and write seven scripts, including Chinese and Japanese.
It is with this breadth of experience, seeing the big picture, that Hari (aka Swami Bodhi Amano in India, aka Wang De Fu in China, aka Chie Noh Ohkami in Japan) brings new life to the world of Christ with scholarship into Second Temple Judaism, the New Testamnent, Early Christianity, and the history, culture and politics of Ancient Rome, and the thought and culture of Ancient Greece.
