The Dharma Scribe

You have probably never heard his name, but if you've ever picked up a book about Buddhism, Nick Ribush has had an impact on your life.

These days, chains like Barnes & Noble have entire aisles devoted to Buddhism. But back in the 1970s, when this Australian doctor--who now produces and distributes dharma books for free--helped publish the first compilation of his lama's teachings, the selection in most mainstream bookstores didn't extend much beyond Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha."

"From my first involvement [in the dharma] I had shown a couple of tendencies," Ribush recalls of his early days in Nepal. "One is to want to very strongly share those teachings with other people, and the other is the medium of editing."

Within weeks of his first one-month course with Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, the first Tibetans to teach extensively to Western students, Ribush, who is now 59, was hard at work editing the transcripts.

"I told Lama Yeshe that I thought this was a real treasure and my life had changed as a result of these teachings," Ribush, who now lives outside Boston, recalls. "So I wanted to make it into a textbook for future courses."

Buddhist teachers talk of planting seeds. That text planted the seed for much of what has blossomed on the shelves of American bookstores a quarter century later. Within two years, Ribush had guided into print a book entitled "Wisdom Energy," the cornerstone of what would become Wisdom Publications, the pre-eminent publisher of dharma books in the world today.

"Nick was really the prime force behind Wisdom," says actor Richard Gere, one of the best-known students of Tibetan Buddhism. "In the English language, all the really serious translation work that has been done since [W. Y.] Evans-Wentz [an early 20th-century translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and other texts] has been done at Wisdom."

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