Ñāṇavīra Thera

Harold Edward Musson was born at a military barracks at Aldershot in England.[2] His father, Edward Lionel Musson, was Captain in the 1st Manchester Regiment. He spent his youth in the environs of Alton, a small town in the Hampshire Downs, and was equally influenced by the nearby town of Aldershot. It is also very likely that the young Musson spent some time in India or Southeast Asia while his father was on his military assignments.

He went to Wellington College, Berkshire, followed by Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1938, and spent that summer learning Italian in Perugia, Italy. In June 1939, he sat for Mathematics, and, in 1940, for Modern Languages (in which he earned a "Class One"). Immediately after the outbreak of war, in 1939, he enlisted in the Territorial Royal Artillery. In July 1941, he was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps, where his knowledge of modern languages was an important asset (he was an interrogator). In October 1942, he was promoted to Lieutenant, and in April 1944, to Temporary Captain. His overseas service with the British Eighth Army was spent primarily in Italy, from 1943 to 1946. Despite his military background, a family acquaintance spoke of him as having "completely resented warfare", a sentiment borne out in one of his letters, written in 1964 in Ceylon. Included in the letter were some sardonic comments to the effect that he had much enjoyed travel before his wartime service, and that he agreed with the classification of intelligence into three classes; "human, animal, and military". He received a B.A. degree in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University for six terms of university study together with three terms allowed for military service.

When the war ended Musson was, according to his own account, in no special need of money and very dissatisfied with his life. In 1948 he was living in London, sharing a flat with a good friend and onetime fellow-officer, Osbert Moore, who felt similarly dissatisfied. They decided to settle their affairs in England, put society behind them, and go to Ceylon to become Buddhist monks. In 1949 they received Novice Ordination at the Island Hermitage, Dodanduwa (from Ven. Ñāṇatiloka), and in 1950 the Higher Ordination as bhikkhus at the Vajirārāma monastery, Colombo. Osbert Moore was given the monastic name of Ñāṇamoli, and Harold Musson that of Ñāṇavīra.

Ñāṇavīra Thera inclined to solitary life and after few years at the Island Hermitage he went to a remote section of southeast Ceylon, where he lived alone for the rest of his life in a one-room, brick-and-plaster kuti (hut) with a tile roof, not far from the village of Bundala, on the edge of a large bird sanctuary. Not long after arriving in Ceylon, he contracted a severe case of amoebiasis which continued to plague him for the next fifteen years. The tropical climate and the local food must have been taxing for the physically ailing Westerner. Bhikkhus only accept food which is offered to them by laypeople, and this custom often leaves them with few options concerning their diet. He died on 5 July 1965, by his own hand and deliberate decision. Ñāṇavīra Thera wrote extensively and carefully on the question of suicide, which arose in him because of the severity of the amoebiasis and satyriasis.[3]

Cover of the first copy of Notes on Dhamma (1963).

Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings fall into two periods: from 1950 until 1960 (the Early Writings), and from 1960 until 1965 (included in Clearing the Path).

The early texts show a man who, in his own thinking and discussion with others, earnestly searches a way to approach the essence of the Buddha's Teaching by repeated trial-and-error. This search has finally yielded its fruit when, after suffering from amoebiasis, Ñāṇavīra Thera claimed to have attained sotāpatti, or stream-entry, an event he recorded in Pali in his private journal on 27 June 1959[4] -

HOMAGE TO THE AUSPICIOUS ONE, WORTHY, FULLY AWAKENED. - At one time the monk Nanavira was staying in a forest hut near Bundala village. It was during that time, as he was walking up and down in the first watch of the night, that the monk Nanavira made his mind quite pure of constraining things, and kept thinking and pondering and reflexively observing the Dhamma as he had heard and learnt it, the clear and stainless Eye of the Dhamma arose in him: "Whatever has the nature of arising, all that has the nature of ceasing." Having been a teaching-follower for a month, he became one attained to right view.

The one who has "entered the stream" has ipso facto abandoned personality-view (sakkāya-ditthi), which is the self-view implicit in the experience of an ordinary worldling not free from ignorance, and understood the essential meaning of the Buddha's teaching on the Four Noble Truths. Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings after 1960 express this very kind of certainty: no more wandering in the dark, no more doubt or speculative guessing.

One of the foremost purveyors of Buddhism to the West after WW2, Thera had personal correspondence with Julius Evola and translated some of his work on Buddhism.[4][5]

Later Writings – Clearing the Path (1960–1965)

In 1963, Ñāṇavīra Thera completed a book called Notes on Dhamma (1960–1963), which was privately published by the Honourable Lionel Samaratunga in the same year (250 copies). Following production of that volume, the author amended and added to the text, leaving at his death an expanded typescript, indicated by the titular expansion of its dates, (1960–1965). Notes on Dhamma has been variously described as "arrogant, scathing, and condescending",[6] as "a fantastic system", and as "the most important book to be written in this century". Ñāṇavīra Thera himself remarked of the book that "it is vain to hope that it is going to win general approval... but I do allow myself to hope that a few individuals... will have private transformations of their way of thinking as a result of reading them".[7]

The influence of Notes on Dhamma on Buddhist thinkers continues to increase more than three decades after its publication. This book has aroused extreme interest and controversy. The Notes "attempt to provide an intellectual basis for the understanding of the Suttas without abandoning saddhā (faith)";[8] that they "have been written with the purpose of clearing away a mass of dead matter which is choking the Suttas";[9] and that, above all, "the Notes are designed to be an invitation to the reader to come and share the author's point of view". The Notes assume that the reader's sole interest in the Pali Suttas is a concern for his own welfare. However, the Notes, with their admitted intellectual and conceptual difficulties, are not the only way to discuss right view or to offer right-view guidance.

Cover of Clearing the Path

A new edition of Notes on Dhamma restored from the original manuscript in 2009.

Letters are a selection of 150 letters written by Ñāṇavīra Thera from his kuti in the Bundala Forest Reserve to local and foreign readers of the Notes who had requested explanation and clarification. Some are thinly disguised essays in a wholly modern idiom. The letters which are collected and published in Clearing the Path are not only something of a commentary on the Notes; they are, independently, a lucid discussion of how an individual concerned fundamentally with self-disclosure deals with the dilemma of finding himself in an intolerable situation, where the least undesirable alternative is suicide.

With openness, calmness, and considerable wit Ñāṇavīra Thera discusses with his correspondents (including his doctor, a judge, a provincial businessman, a barrister, a British diplomat, and another British citizen) the illnesses that plague him and what he can and cannot do about them, and about his own existence. His life as a Buddhist monk in a remote jungle abode is not incidental to the philosophy he expounds: the two are different aspects of the same thing, namely a vision that penetrates into the human situation both as universal and as particular, and recognises that it is this situation which it is the business of each of us to resolve for ourselves. In presenting this view Ñāṇavīra Thera offers a contemporary exposition of the Teaching of the Buddha. In living this view he evokes a dramatic situation wherein an individual resolutely faces those questions which every lucid person must eventually face. The letters are in language, idiom and quotations from a galaxy of thinkers such as Camus, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Kafka. Though familiar to a Western reader, it can be incomprehensible in part, to anyone without such background.

Most of the editorial work connected with Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings was performed by Sāmanera Bodhesako (Robert Smith), who died in Kathmandu in 1988. During the last years of his life in Sri Lanka he founded Path Press which published Clearing the Path: Writings of Ñāṇavīra Thera (1960–1965). He also worked as editor for the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy which published The Tragic, The Comic & The Personal: Selected Letters of Ñánavíra Thera (Wheel 339/341)[10] in 1987. Prof. Forrest Williams of the University of Colorado also participated as the co-editor of Clearing the Path. It is now out of print. The Buddhist Cultural Centre decided to issue it in its two constituent parts, Notes on Dhamma and Letters.

According to Nanavira Thera, Paṭiccasamuppāda does not refer to a chain of events.

Bhikkhu Bodhi had criticized Ñāṇavīra in "A Critical Examination of Ñāṇavīra Thera's "A Note on Paṭiccasamuppāda". Some points made by Nanavira Thera's critics include:

• Dependent origination is all about showing the causal origination of suffering. This suffering is throughout the suttas equated with saṃsāric existence and hence rebirth.
• There are two suttas that give real life examples of dependent origination, DN 15 and MN 38. Both of these suttas speak of consciousness or a gandhabba entering the mother's womb as a condition for the embryo to develop.
• Rebirth (jāti) is always defined as physical birth (e.g. at SN 12.2), and it is never used as a metaphor. The same is true for old age and death.
• The first three links of dependent origination are avijjā (delusion), saṅkhāra (willed activities), and viññāṇa (consciousness). If these three only spanned a single life, then consciousness would cease as soon as ignorance ceases, that is, the arahant would lose consciousness as soon as he reached awakening. We know from the suttas that this is not what happens.
• The second noble truth says that it is the craving that leads to rebirth which is source of suffering. Sometimes the whole sequence of dependent origination is used instead to illustrate the second noble truth. This means that dependent origination, too, must include rebirth.
• A number of the suttas in the Nidāna-saṃyutta (the connected discourses that deal with dependent origination) use vocabulary that refers to rebirth, such as: SN 12.19 (kāyassa bhedā kāyūpago hoti, "when the body breaks up, he goes to a body"); SN 12.38 (tasmiṃ patiṭṭhite viññāṇe virūḷhe āyatiṃ punabbhavābhinibbatti hoti, "when that consciousness has become established and come to growth, there is renewed existence in the future"); SN 12.59 (viññāṇassa avakkanti hoti, "consciousness descends"; this is a common way to express rebirth in the Nidāna-saṃyutta and elsewhere); and many others.
• There is no evidence that any of the early schools of Buddhism understood dependent origination as relating to a single life.
• The entire Pali commentarial tradition interprets dependent origination as spanning across lives.
• A passage in the Paṭiccasamuppādavibhaṅga of the Abhidhamma is sometimes interpreted to refer to a single lifetime. Even if this is correct, which is questionable, it is specifically said to relate only to the Abhidhamma and not to the suttas.

Nevertheless, Buddhadasa took the same stance on Paṭiccasamuppāda, and multiple scholars have noted inconsistencies in the Paṭiccasamuppāda, concluding that it is a composite of several older lists, which were reinterpreted as pointing to rebirth.[11][12][13][note 1][14][15][16][17]

English:

• Notes on Dhamma, Path Press Publications, 2009, ISBN 9789460900013
• Letters to Sister Vajirā, Path Press Publications, 2010, ISBN 9789460900020
• Clearing the Path, Path Press, 1987 (out of print)
• Clearing the Path, Path Press Publications, 2011, ISBN 9789460900044
• Seeking the Path, Path Press Publications, 2011, ISBN 9789460900037
• The Tragic, the Comic, and Personal, BPS, 1987, ISBN 978-955-24-0000-1

German:

• Notizen zu Dhamma, Verlag Beyerlein-Steinschulte, ISBN 978-3-931095-63-5

About Ven Ñāṇavīra:

• The Hermit of Būndala, by Bhikkhu H. Ñāṇasuci, Path Press Publications, 2014, ISBN 978-94-6090-008-2

• Nyanatiloka Mahathera
• Nyanaponika Thera
• Ñāṇamoli Bhikkhu
• Samanera Bodhesako
• Island Hermitage
• Path Press
• Buddhist Publication Society
• Buddhist Cultural Centre

• Hiriko Nanasuci (2014), The Hermit of Bundala: Biography of Nanavira Thera and Reflections on His Life and Work.

Nanavira Thera

• Ñāṇavīra Thera Dhamma Page – An archive of Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings.
• Path Press – Copyright holder of works by Ñāṇavīra Thera, Bodhesako, etc.
• Path Press Publications – Publishers of works by Ñāṇavīra Thera, Bodhesako, etc.

Other

• Martine & Stephen Batchelor, Existence, Enlightenment and Suicide
• The recluse of Bundala anas on Ñāṇavīra Thera by Kingsley Heendeniya