Nibbida: Disenchantment (with demon-sages, for instance)

Nibbida is a Pali word that means “disenchantment,” “disillusionment.” The noun is derived from a verbal root that means to become weary, to have had enough. You might think that it’s considered a negative value—a disposition to be undone—akin to cynicism or hopelessness. But it’s just the opposite. In a recurring, stereotyped passage in the Pali canon, Gotama, the Buddha, says that until you undergo disenchantment you will not be able to step onto the path to human wholeness that he recommends. It just won’t happen, he says. But what does he mean–disenchantment toward what, disillusionment about what?

Remember Malukya? Like the guy in the cartoon, Malukya is a seeker who comes to Gotama expecting, even insisting on, answers to all of his big, burning questions about life and death: does the soul survive bodily dissolution? how did the universe begin? is there an ultimate end? Gotama says that he never claimed to have answers to these kinds of questions. And then he gives his reason:

And why, Mālukya, have I not determined these matters? To do so does not lead to what is beneficial, to the beginning of training, to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowing, to awakening, to unbinding. That is the reason that I have not determined these matters. (Cūḷamālukya Sutta; Majjhimanikāya 63.)

When he says this, Malukya, I suspect, begins to see Gotama in much the same light as our cartoon sage; namely, as a preposterous crank. But what did he expect? The same that you and I expect, I imagine.

What do we expect?  It is true, we all need help in figuring things out.  So, we turn our hopeful gaze to the peaks of religion, philosophy, poetry, meditation, literature, yoga, I-ching, art, politics, psychology, science, etc., etc., etc. Like pilgrims, we walk with loving devotion toward our exalted goal of knowledge, resolution, and certainty. We seek the final verdict. Like the cartoon seeker, we expectantly scale the climatic cliff, look over its edge and find—what?—usually, some version of the Holy Tablet, some set of pre-formulated answers and prescriptions which, if embraced, the Tablet itself proclaims, will enable you to traverse life and death unscathed. The Tablet invariably comes in the form of a grandiose, all-encompassing narrative about life, the world, the person, our beginning and our end.

If we are fortunate, we find something quite different than this on that mountaintop. What we we find, though, we were not seeking, and we could not seek, for we possessed it all along. In the cartoon, the seeker is fortunate because what he finds at the top/at the end of his search is something that propels him straight back to where he already was: to the bottom/at the beginning. The bottom is the very ground we stand on, step by step. The beginning is where we always are, moment by moment.

Who knows? Maybe the cartoon guru just likes to dress like that. And why not? Those are indeed lovely earrings. But I like to think that he is spontaneously making one of the most important decisions that a teacher can make; namely, refusal to play the demon-sage.

The unflagging twentieth-century skeptic E.M. Cioran says that he long sought such a person, one “who would know everything about himself and about others, a demon-sage, divinely clairvoyant.” In short, he sought an enchanter.  But like the cartoon seeker, Cioran’s scrutiny of the sage inevitably disappointed his expectations, obliging him “to sing a different tune: the new elect always possessed some flaw, some defect, some recess of unconsciousness or weakness which lowered him to the level of human beings.” What Cioran saw of course, were  all-too-human “traces of desire and hope, some hint of regret.” Cioran’s response:was to experience nibidda: “What a disappointment!”

Persisting in his quest to find the sage-with-all-the-answers, Cioran found instead, time after time, a mere man, “painted over” like, perhaps, our cartoon sage. Cioran says he ended his search “by understanding the despotism of the Race and no longer dreaming of a non-man, a monster who might be totally imbued with his nothingness.” This is disillusionment, nibbida. Finally, he recognized that “it was madness to conceive of him: he could not exist, absolute lucidity being incompatible with the reality of the organs. ” (E.M. Cioran, “Rages and Resignations” in The Temptation to Exist.)

… absolute lucidity being incompatible with the reality of the organs. Our cartoon sage seems to be making the same point. Our fantasies about beings who possess “absolute lucidity” of whatever variety push us in one direction. Our acknowledgment of the “reality of the organs” pushes us in quite another. Do you know the difference?

By the way, surely you have noticed, or at least suspected, that our meditation halls, yoga centers, and Buddhist sanghas are home to  many demon-sages? How can you recognize a teacher as a demon-sage? A quick test is to ask yourself whether s/he  deals in enchantment (absolute lucidity: pre-packaged answers, promises of enlightenment, heaven, happiness, specialness in general), or disenchantment (the reality of the organs: life as it is).

If the former, that’s a demon-sage. Why not buy him a bra to go with that robe?

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