Preface to ‘The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal’

Topics: dhamma 2024-03-16 14:10

The following is the preface I wrote for the Path Press Publications edition of The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal, available to purchase here.

The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal was originally published in 1987 by the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS) as part of their well-known Wheel series. It is composed primarily of a selection of abridged versions of letters published in full in Clearing the Path, which was also published for the first time in 1987. Though the content of one is almost entirely made up of the content of the other, the two books serve quite different purposes.

Only 250 copies of Notes on Dhamma had ever been printed prior to its inclusion in Clearing the Path, and the book had never been commercially available. As such, anyone interested in reading it would have had a difficult time actually getting their hands on a copy—assuming that they even knew of the book’s existence to begin with. Being distributed by the BPS as part of the Wheel series, The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal would have exposed a far greater number of people to the writings of Ven. Ñāṇavīra than might otherwise have been.

Sāmaṇera Bodhesako, the original editor of both Clearing the Path and The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal, appears to have taken this potentially large audience into account when making certain editorial decisions about the versions of the letters found in the present work. Although he did not explicitly state why he made the editorial decisions he did, it seems clear that Ven. Bodhesako’s main intention was simply to publish versions of the selected letters which were edited so they would be more readable as stand-alone essays than the original versions were. This would mean that each letter would have been edited to remove material which was not relevant to the main point the author was trying to make, and in some cases, even some amount of material which was relevant has been removed in order to keep each letter as focussed on a single topic as possible.

In a couple of instances though, it seems that perhaps Ven. Bodhesako wanted to ‘soften up’ a passage here and there so as to not put off certain readers. Specifically, in letter 3 the comparison between Christianity and drug addiction is far more explicit in the version of the letter found in Clearing the Path, and in the Clearing the Path version of letter 30 the author writes that, if one wanted to introduce an existentialist philosopher to the Dhamma, that it would be “worse than useless to give them a copy of Buddhism in a Nutshell or a life subscription to the BPS” (a remark which is especially unlikely to have been appreciated by the BPS!). In this new edition of The Tragic, the Comic, and the Personal these passages are among several which have been reinstated, so as to bring the versions of the letters found here closer to the authoritative versions found in Clearing the Path. A small number of informative editorial notes previously only found in Clearing the Path have also been added where appropriate, and a number of differences in spelling, punctuation, the position of paragraph breaks, and the formatting of Sutta references have been changed to reflect what appears in Clearing the Path as well.

The table that follows is another new addition to the book, and shows the number of each letter as found in Clearing the Path or Seeking the Path, the date of each letter, and the recipient. I hope that this new edition is able to introduce many more readers to Ven. Ñāṇavīra’s work.