Clearing the Path

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]’.