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Clearing the Path consists of the final version of the author’s principal work, Notes on Dhamma (1960-1965), faithfully restored from the original manuscript, followed by the letters he exchanged with several interested individuals during the last five years of his life. Part of the correspondence started after Notes on Dhamma was first published and carefully distributed as a private edition of 250 cyclostyled copies, and can be regarded as ‘something of a commentary on the Notes’. Notes on Dhamma has been variously described as ‘arrogant, scathing, and condescending’, as ‘a fantastic system’, and as ‘the best and most important book on Buddhism ever written by a Westerner’. 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 [the Notes]’.

Biografie

Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera, formerly Harold Musson, was born in 1920 into a British military family, and attained the rank of Captain during World War II. After the war he graduated with First Class Honours in Modern Languages from Cambridge University, but dissatis fied with his mundane life, he left England for Sri Lanka in 1948 and became a samanera the following year. He ordained as a bhikkhu, taking the name of Ñāṇavīra, at Vajirārāma monastery (Colombo) in 1950, and spent his early years at the Island Hermitage. He later moved to a solitary kuṭi near Būndala, where he spent most of his ordained life until his death in 1965.

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