10 minute read
Interview – Dr Nick Ribush
Heartfelt Change By Anthony Kilner
You don’t have to be perfect to be a monk! It’s the impression ShirleySienna and I got while interviewing Dr Nick Ribush (pronounced Ree-bush). ShirleySienna suggested it as the name of the story, however its way too long.
Heartfelt Change is relevant as there were two major changes in Nick’s life where his heart energy exploded from him and he knew what course to follow. One was with music and the other was his first foray into Buddhism in Nepal at a monastery in Kopan.
The interview, linked in the story, runs through a major part of Nick’s journey into Buddhism. We’ve selected a snippet of this information for the story however it doesn’t do justice to hearing Nick recall his stories from a child born in Melbourne, through adolescence and into adult hood as a practicing doctor.
Dr Nick was born in Melbourne (1941) to Russian Jewish immigrants from Latvia and grew up in Canterbury speaking mainly Russian until he went to school and began to learn English properly.
At a young age, mid-teens, Nick decided he was going to become a doctor. He graduated from Melbourne University Medical School in 1964. Nick explains his heritage in detail in the video, however his father wanted to be a doctor before coming to Australia and while that didn’t work out for him, he encouraged his sons to go down that path, consciously or otherwise, with Nick’s brother also graduating from med school in 1968. In the meantime, Scotch College was the home for Nick’s schooling prior to uni. In 1958 Nick’s world changed on several fronts. On a personal level, his father passed away, it was his last year at Scotch and the epiphany above all was finding jazz music. Prior to this Nick’s world was classical and opera and he wasn’t keen on it at all.
Nick heard some jazz at a friend’s place and he was taken by it. One Friday he and a friend went to the Melbourne Jazz club in Burnley, Richmond, where it was being staged at that time.
In Nick’s words, “I really got off on it!” He explained that, “It was like my heart chakra
Camberwell 1944
Melb Uni Jazz Band 1960
1972. On the road with Marie
Graduation 1964
opened although I didn’t describe it as that then. It was like my first religious experience!” Nick decided he wanted to learn how to play jazz and that set off a lifetime of jazz loving fun.
I could write a book on the adventures of Nick, however after a time working at Prince Henry’s, followed by a gap year at the Heidelberg Repat before heading back to Prince Henry’s, he decided to specialise in kidney disease. This part of his interview is very open and honest.
From here he decided to work in a clinical situation and scored a job at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Aged 29 at this stage and far from Melbourne, his life changed again. He met his girlfriend and eventual travel partner Marie. It was around this time Nick got into smoking dope and started looking at the world differently. He couldn’t quite understand why analgesics, alcohol and cigarettes were legal and weed wasn’t. There is a huge story just in this part so I’ll leave the audio for our listeners and won’t spoil the story for you.
This is a thought-provoking quote from a text written by Dr
With Lama Yeshe, Nepal 1973
Nick in another article. “One of the axioms of medicine is that, while it is necessary to treat the symptoms of a disease, it is more important to treat its cause. This is my reply to many who regard a medical doctor’s becoming a monk as some kind of loss. Physical disease is symptomatic of an unhealthy mind, and while it must be treated, the underlying mental cause must also be eradicated. This can only be done through the practice of Dharma, which alone offers the possibility of a perfectly healthy mind. Before one can dispense this ultimate remedy, one has to achieve it in one’s own mind. This is the way to be of greatest benefit to others.”
With adventures in Bali and further travels east Marie and Nick ended up in Nepal. It was 1972 and the world was a
Ordination 1974 Lama Yeshe, New Delhi 1982 Melbourne 1983 Yerpa Tibet 1993
Lama Zopa, wife Wendy, Boston 1998 Dalai Lama Boston 2015
Ed retreat
different place. On his travels Nick encountered Buddhism and on a limited budget stole a book in Bangkok. It was a book called Buddhism, by Christmas Humphreys. It was a start and ultimately led him to Kopan and the monastery. While the book wasn’t really that good, according to Nick, it was a big catalyst to his becoming a publisher – the heart expanding moment! In Nick’s words, “We wended our way there through the beautiful rice fields of the sparsely populated valley, nothing like it is now, and climbed the hill. Nobody seemed to be around but there were a couple of notices on a bulletin board. One was for a ten-day Goenka Vipassana course; the other was for the Third Kopan Course, starting 28 October 1972. Marie enthusiastically suggested we do the short one, but since the Kopan course was only 300 rupees for the month, much cheaper than staying in Kathmandu, I insisted we do that.” This led to the fulfilment of the second heart opening moment, meeting the teacher, Lama Thubten
Zopa Rinpoche, and the teachings made attending the Kopan course, the most important event of my life.
Eventually this phenomenal journey saw Nick become ordained as a Buddhist monk. After this course Marie (who became the nun Yeshe Khadro), and Nick worked on the transcripts from previous courses and produced the first book of teachings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
Since then he has been a student of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche and a full time worker for their international organization, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT).
Nick lived and breathed being a monk for 12 years – 1974 to 1986. During that time he has travelled the world supporting Buddhism, including setting up Tushita, a meditation centre in New Delhi, and eventually heading up Wisdom Publishing in the UK, spreading the teachings of his Lamas. He still does this today.
In 1974 Nick played a pivotal role in setting up the Chenrezig Institute in Queensland, one
of the first and still one of the largest Buddhist centres in western world. Just this story alone is amazing how everything aligned to make this possible.
I asked Nick about leaving the monkhood becoming a lay person. In his words:
“After Lama Yeshe’s spectacular Six Yogas of Naropa teachings at Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, near Pisa, Italy, over the winter of 1982–83, I led a two-month editing retreat in which seven of us took on various projects editing some of Lama Yeshe’s other tantric teachings. During this time, the director of Wisdom Publications in London quit and Lama Yeshe asked me to leave my job running the Tushita Centre in New Delhi and take over Wisdom, which I had co-founded with him at Kopan in 1975. At first Lama showed some reluctance, saying, “London is not a good place for monks and nuns.” In fact, at the start there would be just three of us there, two nuns — my ex, Yeshe Khadro, Robina Courtin and me. Still, in the end, I went there to begin my next adventure.
“Up until that time I had always worn my monk’s robes and had lived in Nepal and India, where everybody understood what a Buddhist monk was. But in London, I thought that I would have more credibility as a businessman running a publishing company if I wore lay clothes. So that decision was the beginning of the slippery slope back into lay life. Since we didn’t have much money, I finished up living in a sort of squat with other laypeople, leading what was basically an ordinary life: wearing regular clothes, going to the office every day, and returning in the evening to a home in which there weren’t any other Sangha. So, over the next three years I began to think more like a layperson than a monk, which caused me some conflict.
“I have to blame my weak mind primarily, but the conditions were also stacked against me, as Lama had predicted. How I finished up disrobing is a long story, but I figured I’d rather be a good lay practitioner than a bad monk. So in 1986, I returned my ordination to Geshe Wangchen, the resident teacher of our London centre, and that was it!
“Wisdom Publications continued to grow and establish itself as one of world’s premier Buddhist publishing companies, and in 1989 we moved to Boston, as the prospects for greater success seemed to lie in America.”
This interview with Nick was totally fascinating and I admire him for his honesty and very frank way of chatting. I’ve met many people over the years and as I say in the interview he talks so monkilly! He reminded me of the gentle souls of the older monks I worked with in India. It was a special interview in more ways than one. The one special part of Nick is that while he’s lived away from Australia for a long time, 50 years, he hasn’t lost that larrikin side to him – of the boy that grew up in Melbourne, found jazz music around the time the Beatles and The Rolling Stones were growing names in the music scene.
Please check out the websites and books Nick is involved in to bring about awareness of Buddhism to the world.
Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive Wisdom Publications Kurukulla Center Recent teachings for Kurukulla Chenrezig Institute Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT)
Anthony is available for Dream Interpretations, 1:1 Readings and Bridging Realms Core Issue Vibrational Healing™ sessions.
Image Credit: Dr Nick Ribush, Pixabay
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