Ñāṇavīra Thera (born Harold Edward Musson; 5 January 1920 – 5 July 1965) was an English Theravāda Buddhist monk, ordained in 1950 in Sri Lanka.

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".

In 1948 he was living in London, sharing a flat with a good friend and onetime fellow-officer, Osbert Moore, who felt similarly dissatisfied.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

[citation needed] Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings after 1960 express this very kind of certainty: no more wandering in the dark, no more doubt or speculative guessing.

[4][5] The main portion of the Early Writings consists of letters written to late Ñānamoli Thera, where the two English monks explored many modes of Western thought (including quantum mechanics).

Gradually they discovered that the Western thinkers most relevant to their interests were those from the closely allied schools of phenomenology and existentialism, to whom they found themselves indebted for clearing away a lot of mistaken notions with which they had burdened themselves.

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).

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.

Most of the editorial work connected with Ñāṇavīra Thera's writings was performed by Sāmanera Bodhesako (Robert Smith), who died in Kathmandu in 1988.

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.