Nidahas

My friend Tom Rosen­berg sent me a copy of his film Ñāṇavīra Hamuduru. It’s a labour of love and a fit­ting trib­ute to a monk who has influ­enced many of us in the way we approach the Buddha’s teach­ing. I’m glad that the film seems to have trig­gered an inter­est among Colombo Bud­dhists when it …

This is part 6 of a series on Ven. Katuku­runde Ñāṇananda Thera. Many months have passed since I met Bhante Ñāṇananda for the first time, and had this series of dis­cus­sions. More record­ings remain to be pub­lished than have already appeared here. Unfor­tu­nately it seems unlikely that I will man­age to tran­scribe them. I would …

The final part of the Mahāhatthipadopama Sutta con­tains an inter­est­ing analy­sis by Ven. Sāriputta Thera which sheds light on the con­nec­tion between saḷāyatana and pañcupādā­nakkhandha. I had care­lessly com­mented on this sec­tion by read­ing the Eng­lish trans­la­tion with­out refer­ring to the Pāḷi, and in his reply to my notes Bhante Ñāṇananda pointed out an impor­tant …

Bhante Anālayo’s works are marked by a pre­ci­sion and thor­ough­ness that seems to bor­der on per­fec­tion­ism. I first saw this in Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Awak­en­ing, and later in his other pub­li­ca­tions. Since com­plet­ing the work which earned him a Ph.D., he has moved on to com­par­a­tive stud­ies in Early Bud­dhism, and ranks among …

The fol­low­ing is a min­i­mally edited tran­script of Bhante Ñāṇananda’s com­ments on the Neyy­attha Sutta, which seems to have been the seed out of which the Two Truths doc­trine has been devel­oped. “We come across this in the Aṅguttara Nikāya: nītattha sutta and neyy­attha sutta. Nīta, taken as it is, means you are led to …

In the tra­di­tional exe­ge­sis, pan­cupādā­nakkhandhā (five aggre­gates of cling­ing) and nāma-rūpa (name-and-form) are used inter­change­ably, imply­ing that these two are the same. As Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera also pointed out in his Notes on Dhamma, this is a dubi­ous inter­pre­ta­tion that does not find explicit sup­port in the Sut­tas. I ask Bhante Ñāṇananda how we should …

There is hardly any teach­ing that has given rise to more inter­nal dis­putes among Bud­dhists than paṭiccasamuppāda. My next ques­tion is based on a com­ment by Bhante Ñāṇananda, which con­sid­ers paṭiccasamuppāda as the golden mean between atthitā (exis­tence) and natthitā (non-existence), replac­ing them with samu­daya (aris­ing) and vaya (pass­ing away).

Bhante Ñāṇananda is not the monk I thought he would be. He is much more. As I recall my first meet­ing with him in his small cave kuti, the first word that crosses my mind is “inno­cent”. For a senior monk who has been in the order for more than 40 years, he is dis­arm­ingly sim­ple, unpre­ten­tious and friendly. Child­like even. But you would not get that impres­sion from his clas­sics Con­cept and Real­ity in Early Bud­dhist Thought and The Magic of the Mind.