Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 15-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche examines how people respond to the insight that life is fundamentally meaningless and empty. He begins by quoting Ecclesiastes, noting that the biblical author possessed deep wisdom about existence rather than mere pessimism. He then traces three common reactions: some become depressed when reality fails to match their expectations; others become hedonists, pursuing pleasure, which inevitably ends in boredom as the senses dull and require ever-greater stimulation; still others retreat into delusional religious belief systems that promise meaning and eternal comfort. Rinpoche then offers the Buddhist alternative, rooted in the first noble truth: rather than denying suffering or numbing it, Buddhism confronts reality directly and offers a causal sequence from suffering through faith, tranquility, joy, and happiness, ultimately leading to freedom. The teaching is pitched at those beginning to explore why Buddhism, unlike other responses, does not lead to despair despite acknowledging life’s meaninglessness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 D.mp3
UUID: 2cd7929e-af85-4131-b3b2-f20026993196
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Depression (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 15.1 minutes
Words: ~1,961
And the first words in this beautiful book of wisdom is, Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless. The sun rises and the sun sets and it rises again. There is nothing new in the world. Everything’s been done before. Everything ends in sadness and ashes.
And we don’t know who the author of that book was. In contemporary Christianity, for some strange reason, they always say that whoever wrote it was an old and very depressed person. But looking at it as a Buddhist, one could only come to the conclusion was that, well, he may have been depressed, it’s hard to say from reading it, but one thing’s for certain, he had a deep insight into the nature of existence. It’s true. He talks about wealth and gain.
And he says that ultimately it has no meaning. Well, any wise person would agree with that. He talks about fame. And he says that you can, people will praise you in that. But what is it?
It’s empty. And ultimately it doesn’t lead to anything. Well, any really wise and insightful person would tell you that. And, of course, in recent times even philosophers have come to this conclusion. One of the more popular philosophers of this century, Jean Paul Sartre, said that life is nothing more than a useless passion.
Even the existentialist Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, he came to the conclusion that life was absolutely meaningless. And people have often suggested that these philosophers were very pessimistic. But if you look at most of these philosophers, they weren’t particularly pessimistic. When you read their writings, you may get that impression. But somebody like Jean Paul Sartre led a very, very full, a very fruitful and apparently a relatively happy life, certainly no less happy than the majority of people.
Simply putting one’s finger on reality and seeing that in some senses it is meaningless and empty doesn’t necessarily lead to depression. But to some people it does. And probably the reason for this is that they have come to expect that life should be different. Sorry. They have come to understand that life has not fulfilled their expectations.
They have wanted life to be one particular way. It has emerged that it is not like that. They have wanted life to be full and fulfilling. They wanted things to go the way they want. They wanted to live forever.
They wanted to be continually happy. And they find that life doesn’t do that. It doesn’t work that way. And so they decide to turn their back on a world that has disappointed them and they become profoundly depressed. There are other approaches to having a deeper understanding to the nature of reality.
Some people see that a life can be rather meaningless, that no matter how sweet the fruit you have that you get, that when you look at the end and you understand that it all ends in death, some people rather than reacting by becoming depressed, they decide, Okay, I’ve got a few more years to go, a few more decades. By God, I’m going to enjoy it. They become hedonists. They decide to try to cram as much pleasure in in the time that they’ve got left. Very nicely described in that old saying, Eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you die.
This unfortunately is not a very for a while this seems to work. You can stave off reality. You can keep it at bay. But, of course, one of the ultimate outcomes of hedonism is a slightly different version of depression and that’s boredom. Hedonism ends in boredom.
And probably one of the most exquisite of all sufferings is boredom. For example, you may have attended a long, long, long, long talk and you’re sitting there and it aches, It pains. You want it to end. It’s so boring. Now some people see life like that.
And certainly hedonism usually ends in boredom. The reason for it is is because of the very nature of the sense organs. The sense organs have got nerve endings in them. When these nerve endings are stimulated in a particular way we get pleasure. But just as we get calluses on our fingers, on our hands, if we use them often, we get as it were psychological calluses on pleasure.
If we experience pleasure a lot, we enjoy it, but after a while to get that same level of satisfaction, we need to stimulate the senses to a higher degree. And then for a while we will get fulfillment and satisfaction, but then the senses start to become dull again and we need more stimulation. And, of course, it gets to the stage where you can’t go beyond a certain point. And then you break down and you have boredom or worse, perversion. Some people react to they look at life, at existence, they find it rather frightening prospect, so they retreat into delusion.
They can’t find any meaning in life. And so they look for ideologies or philosophies that claim to offer meaning. Well, the meaning of life is God wants us to do this or he’s got a special plan for us or something like that. And so they retreat into that. And there is no doubt that this, once again, for a while, can be very satisfying.
One can, if you try very hard, convince yourself that you’re going to live forever, that there is a possibility of living in some world where nothing ever goes wrong. And when you get there, you’ll meet all your friends again. It will just be wonderful. We’ll all live together forever. Quite honestly, if you think about it, it sounds like a recipe for hell.
But certainly some people, without thinking too deeply about it, it sounds a better alternative than having to look reality in the face and see its true nature. So they become religious. They believe that there’s some plan, that everything has a meaning, that everything that happens has happened in order to teach us something or to show us something, to reward us or to punish us. And, of course, it is possible for some people to continue that belief for a long time, some people forever, but many people cannot. Sooner or later that old spoiler reality breaks through and one cannot continue to maintain that belief.
And then one falls into tremendous meaninglessness. One has what is called a spiritual crisis. So if it’s true that reality has no meaning, that existence is suffering, and if the possible responses to this are hedonism or retreating in deluded religious beliefs or simply becoming depressed. What is the Buddhist solution to the problem of the nature of reality? Well, the first thing about Buddhism is, is that it doesn’t offer us any easy solutions and it doesn’t fob us off with any deluded ideas.
The very first principle in Buddhism is get it straight right from the beginning that life is suffering. Now some people will turn away from that. They will say, Oh, how depressing or how pessimistic. But sooner or later one will come to see, of course, that that is in fact true. In some people’s cases, in fortunate people’s cases, they see this when they are young.
That gives them plenty of time to adjust to that reality. Many people don’t see it until they’re old. They think life is marvelous, life is wonderful, I’ll live forever, I’ll be young and vital and all things bright and beautiful and everything will be okay forever. But then as they start getting old, their teeth fall out and their friends die and they read in the newspaper the horrible things that human beings do to each other. Gradually they start to become depressed, disillusioned, world weary.
And only then they turn to the dharma. But if you actually look at the dharma, one of the wonderful things about it, it doesn’t try to pretend. It confronts you with the major problem, the central problem of existence right from the very beginning. Ladies and gentlemen, the good news is that life is suffering. Now one may believe that or disbelieve it.
But if you take it as a given, it starts to make a lot of sense. Now in Europe when Buddhism first started to become popular at the very beginning of the last century, one of the most popular philosophers of that time was the German philosopher Schopenhauer. And he was very influenced by Buddhism. And he was a profoundly pessimistic man. And he built a marvelous philosophical system based on Buddhist and Hindu ideas which had a profound influence on German romanticism, the young Germans at that time, which is one of the reasons why some of the very first Buddhist monks were Germans.
They came from an intellectual background which was very pessimistic. And for many decades it was people who had turned away from life disappointed and depressed that became interested in Buddhism because they thought that Buddhism was reaffirming what they already believed, that the most appropriate response to life is sadness and gloominess. Of course, now that Buddhism is better known in the West, considerably better known, we know that that’s not the general Buddhist outlook. While Buddhism says that life is suffering, that existence has no meaning, the most appropriate response to that is not depression. In the Samyuttanikaya, the Buddha talks about the steps that lead naturally one from another as a result of seeing the nature of existence.
It’s a discourse that is not often discussed. But in the nature of when we are talking about depression, it’s a very meaningful discourse. And in this the Buddha talks about a causal chain. The first is suffering. The second is faith.
The third is tranquility. The fourth is joy. The fifth is happiness. The sixth is concentration, the seventh is knowledge and vision, the eighth is disgust, the ninth is the fading of passions, And the tenth is freedom. And the Buddha says that each of these states, if one has the proper attitude and the proper insight, each state will lead naturally to the next one.
So if we look at them, several of them relate to depression. The first is suffering. We suffer. Even if we’re healthy, we may be suffering psychologically. If we’re happy now, we will not be later.
The very nature of existence is that it is suffering. We respond to that in different ways. Some people try to deny it. Some people try to cram in as much pleasure as they can to eliminate that suffering. But there is no escape.
We have to confront it eventually. Now when we confront suffering and we just see it as it is, not trying to explain it away with myths or stories, then we discover that there is a philosophy that starts at this very point. It starts at the place we are at and it’s called Dharma. Buddhism starts with the first noble truth, suffering. The third noble truth is that suffering can be overcome.
Now if we are confronted by suffering, we come into contact with the Dharma that promises freedom from suffering, faith will arise, saddha. That is, we develop faith in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. We take the three refuges. We start to practice Dharma with various degrees of understanding, varying degrees of commitment. But if we walk the path with confidence and diligence, it will lead to tranquility.
We start to become calm and more relaxed, more reconciled to suffering rather than angry at it. So faith, saddha, leads to tranquility, passaddhi. When the mind is tranquil, we become joyful, piti.