The Hermit of Bundala
A few years ago, I hired a ‘safari’ jeep to take me into the Bundala National Park, one of the world’s great bird reserves, on the south-east coast of Sri Lanka. After twenty minutes, the jeep broke down. The driver and guide soon became anxious. With darkness about to fall, they explained, the mosquitoes would soon be swarming and the Russell’s vipers had already begun their evening’s hunting. Rescue eventually arrived, but I left the Park with a strong sense not just of its beauty but also of the danger of the place.
It would have been a still more dangerous place sixty years earlier when local villagers built a tiny bungalow, or kuti, in the jungle for a Cambridge educated, ex-British army officer to live in. Not yet a National Park, it was a wilderness that teemed with elephants, leopards and wild boar, and a much larger population of snakes and crocodiles than today’s.
The villagers knew the man, not as Captain Harold E. Musson, but by the name and title given him when ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1950 — Nanavira (pronounced ‘Nyarnaveera’) Thera (Elder). The son of a wealthy career army officer, Harold was born in 1920 and educated at English boarding schools before studying Italian and French at Cambridge. On leaving university, he joined up and was assigned to the Intelligence Corps, serving in Algeria and Italy, where his linguistic skills were used in interrogating prisoners of war. His knowledge of Italian also enabled him to read, at the end of the war, a remarkable book on Buddhism that he was later to translate and that decisively affected his future — Julius Evola’s The Doctrine of Awakening.
In the immediate post-war years in London, Musson — who didn’t need to work for a living — oscillated between translating this book and, as he recalled, ‘an orgy of wine, women and song’, often in the company of a wartime colleague, Osbert ‘Bertie’ Moore. Disillusioned by their aimless, dissolute existence, and inspired by an article they’d read about a group of European Buddhist monks in Ceylon, the two friends abruptly left England in 1948 and joined this small community in the Island Hermitage, near Hikkaduwa, founded and still presided over by a former German violinist and composer, Nyanatiloka Thera.
During his years at the Hermitage, Nanavira learnt Pali, made a close study of the Buddha’s discourses, but also and more singularly extended his knowledge of European philosophy, focussing especially on existentialist authors, including Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. In 1955, however, he decided ‘to get away from books and practise what I am now preaching’, essentially through uninterrupted meditation or, as he preferred to call it, ‘mental concentration’, on the Buddha’s teachings.
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
