Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 11-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche examines how genuine understanding of reality’s true nature differs radically from depression. He begins by establishing that joy and mental tranquility enable concentration and insight — the Buddha’s “knowledge and vision of things as they really are.” When we glimpse this reality, we may initially feel despair at the suffering inherent in existence. However, the proper response is not depression but nibbidā, best translated as disenchantment. Ribur illustrates this with the analogy of watching a magician: once you see the backstage apparatus, the illusion dissolves and awe fades, but without accompanying anger or disgust. He explores a second layer — that seeing through delusion may invoke humor, recognizing we’ve been tricked. From disenchantment flows virāga, a fading of passion and reactivity, leading finally to equanimity and vimutti, complete freedom of mind. The Dharma’s cure for long-term depression is not positive thinking but acceptance of reality as it is.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 D.mp3
UUID: cbab99e9-4e0c-4f0e-a656-0d9c7e129f0b
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Depression (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 10.9 minutes
Words: ~1,254
We are happy. Sukha. Likewise, Buddha says when the mind, when we are tranquil, joyful, and happy, it becomes possible to meditate. It becomes possible to concentrate. It becomes possible to start to adjust and transform the mind so that happiness leads to concentration, samadhi.
When the mind is very concentrated and it starts to look within itself, when we start to look at ourselves, we develop a state which the Buddha calls, knowledge and vision of things as they really are. Now, normally when we develop a knowledge and vision of things as they really are, If you’ve lived through one war and you’ve been told that that’s the war to end all wars and six months later another one breaks out, and if over a period of time you become increasingly disillusioned and depressed and melancholic towards what human beings do to each other within our society, within families, between nations, when you come to see what the Buddha says is true, that everything is suffering, we start to become very depressed. But if we have the right attitude and we develop yathābhūta ñāṇadassana, a knowledge and vision of things as they really are, according to the Buddha, this will lead not to depression but a state that he calls nibbidā. Now this word is usually translated as loathing or disgust. They’re very powerful words.
You think of disgust. You get disgusted with yourself or you get disgusted with other people or you reach under the hospital bed and you pull out something and you take the lid off it and, oh, feel disgusted. It’s a very strong meaning. It’s a very strong word. However, what it means in Dharma is it’s very hard to translate, but it has a variety of meanings.
It can mean to turn away, dispassion, disillusionment, or perhaps the best word of all is disenchantment. We become disenchanted. And under normal circumstances we are indeed very much enchanted. It is as if reality has enchanted us so that we don’t really see it as it is, particularly when we’re young. We were talking about that last week, the fire of youth.
And then suddenly we become disenchanted. And indeed in one of the Buddhist discourses he describes this as being like a man who is at a theatrical performance and he’s watching a magician. And that magician pulls rabbits out of hats and does all sorts of remarkable things and one is enchanted, entertained, impressed. You wonder how it could be done. Then you go behind the scenes.
You go backstage, and there you see all of the apparatus, the strings, the trapdoors, the mirrors, and you become disenchanted. It’s not magical anymore. You don’t feel disappointed. You don’t feel angry. You don’t feel disgusted.
But that sense of awe that you had is certainly not there anymore because you are now disenchanted. The enchantment has gone. So perhaps one of the best translations of this word is disenchantment. When you see things as they really are, you become disenchanted. I’ve got a theory.
I don’t know whether it’s true. But don’t you find it unusual or interesting that people always make love with the lights off? I think that there is a very sound psychological reason for this. You don’t want to look too closely. Okay?
Best to keep the lights off. I used to think it was because people were shy, but, of course, that’s not so. I mean, if you’ve lived with somebody for a long time, you’re not shy. There’s a very good reason for it. If the lights are on, you can see all the blemishes, the scars, and the pimples, and and all of that sort of thing.
So it’s best to keep the lights off. You don’t want to disenchant your partner. You don’t want to feel disenchanted. You don’t want to look too closely. However, this word nibbidā has another meaning.
Nibbidā. The bid comes from vidya, which means to know. But it’s also related to the word or the word vidya is also related to the word to laugh. In Sanskrit drama, the clown or the fool is always called the viduṣaka. So I think that there may be this second response.
It may be that when we look very closely and we see the true nature of reality, on one hand we may become dispassionate. On the other hand, we may suddenly understand that we have been deluded, indeed tricked for so long that we start to see that the joke’s on us. And that it invokes a sense of humor, laughter even. I have said this before, if you tease a child, you close your hand and tease a child with a sweet, and the child tries to catch your hand and you tease him, and eventually you give the child your hand and he opens it and he finds there is no sweet in it, One child will be quite annoyed. Another one may laugh.
He will see that the joke’s on him. So when we see the real nature of reality, it may not be that we necessarily become depressed or sad or gloomy, but rather that we either become calm with a touch of a sense of humor as well. And when we see the true nature of reality, the next step is Viraga. Virāga means discolor. Virāga means when something colorful has been left out in the sun and the color starts to fade.
So the color goes out of your life. The passion, the strong responses to this enticement, to that enticement starts to fade away. And one starts to experience that highest of Buddhist qualities, equanimity. In the face of the loss and gain, pain and happiness, fame and obscurity. Rather than being elated one minute and depressed the next, we have that equanimity, that stoic calm that is so characteristic of the Buddha’s.
And then we have what the Buddha calls vimutti, freedom. When we are no longer pulled into, when we no longer react to a reality, rather than become depressed, we become calm and freed. And so, in actual fact, whereas in the case of occasional depression, Time heals that. If we are suffering from long term depression, the best cure for this is the acceptance of reality. Now, most people will only accept death after somebody close to them has died and they’ve gone through a period of depression.
Most people will only accept any of the vicissitudes of life once it has wounded them and they’ve gone through feeling a period of depression. But if we practice the Dharma genuinely, we have to understand that Dharma is not like a lot of conventional religions which try to convince us that everything’s wonderful, that everything’s marvelous, that everything will go well, that all we have to do is pray, and everything will work out. There are two responses to reality. One is that we can pretend it’s different from what it is, and we may be able to keep up that pretense for a long time. The other one is to gradually reconcile ourselves to reality so that we come to understand it.
We come to accept it. And this is the path of peace. This is the path that generally leads to a freedom from depression. This is the path that eventually leads to anuttarā cetovimutti, utter freedom of mind. And that is the aim, that is the goal, that is the culmination.