Thinker’s Notebook

Book excerpt: This book contains the collected posthumous papers of the English monk-scholar Nyanamoli, who counts as one of the foremost translators of Pali Buddhist texts into English. Besides being a gifted translator Nyanamoli was also a gifted thinker, philosopher, and poet. Besides some longer essays, most of the notes are only one paragraph long and were written in the 1950s as a Buddhist monk. The notes and essays deal with profound topics such as ontology, metaphysics, nuclear physics, logic, but there is also humour, irony, sarcasm and light poetry. Four essays were earlier published in a Wheel Publication no. 52/53, Pathways of Buddhist Thought.