How Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard found a happy balance
Matthieu Ricard is a rare being. A Buddhist monk with a doctorate in molecular biology, he has authored several internationally bestselling books, is an accomplished and prolific photographer, interprets for the Dalai Lama, is a driving force behind 150 humanitarian projects and has played a key role in ongoing research into the brain-changing effects of meditation. Each one of these achievements is special; together, they distinguish Ricard as a modern-day Renaissance man.
Yet, there is much more to this humble individual. Matthieu Ricard is deeply, viscerally, committed to promoting a better, more compassionate society through his thoughts, words and deeds.
Oh and, incidentally, he’s been called the happiest man known to science, but more on that later.
A kind upbringing
Born in Aix-les-Bains in the foothills of the French Alps in 1946, Ricard seemed destined for a life less ordinary. His father was Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard), a philosopher who became renowned in France for championing liberal ideals such as liberty and democracy, and became world-famous for his challenges to both communism and Christianity. His mother, Yahne le Toumelin, was — and is (she’s still producing works at age 90) — a well-known abstractionist painter.
He grew up with a sister, a brother and an often absent father. Revel, a philosophy professor at the time, worked at several colleges abroad but the family didn’t always follow him on these postings. Despite this, Ricard recalls a happy childhood in the countryside: “I grew up quite a lot with my mother and my grandmother. They were both extremely kind. My mother has an immense heart. [Growing up], that quality of kindness, affection and care inspired me as a model.”
The family moved to Paris in the 1960s when Ricard was in secondary school. Toumelin exhibited her work and Revel embarked on a career as an essayist and writer, and their home was often filled with intellectuals. Ricard remembers he was “fascinated listening to the discussions”, but as a teenager he was more interested in nature and was an avid birdwatcher and sailor. “I became a scientist rather than a philosopher or intellectual, so it’s a different way of thinking … I wasn’t rebelling against anything, but I had very different fields of interests.”
Becoming a scientist
One area where a young Ricard was influenced by his father, though, was in his decision to study biology at university. “I wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, but my father said there are so many doctors and science is really fascinating these days, so why don’t you do that? I said, ‘OK!’ That was the only time I really listened to him.” He trained in molecular biology and, an outstanding student, went on to complete a starred PhD in cell genetics, spending six years at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under French Nobel Prize-winner François Jacob.
In 1967, however, in the six months between finishing university and starting at Pasteur, fate intervened. “I travelled to India because I’d seen some documentaries done by a friend of mine, Arnaud Desjardins, on all the great Tibetan Buddhist masters who had fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet. There was an incredible array of sages. They looked like 20 Socrates alive in our time, right there, accessible.”
Ricard spent three months in India and met “many wonderful teachers” including one who deeply impressed him, Kangyur Rinpoche. “When I came back I realised [this experience] had really changed my vision and attitude and aspirations,” he says. He returned to India each year while doing his PhD and in 1972, after completing his doctoral thesis, he abandoned a promising career and moved to the Himalayas, where he has lived ever since.
The Frenchman’s life trajectory may have changed dramatically on leaving Paris, but he is extremely grateful for his time at Pasteur. “It gave me the taste for the vigour of science methodology, to base everything on the vigorous empirical investigation of things … I’ve kept that as something that really matters rather than be carried away by all those fanciful things.”
Certainly, the worlds of science and spirituality don’t tend to easily coexist. For Ricard, however, Buddhism has always been as a domain of investigation. “I think contemplative science, which Buddhism is in a way, has been built up for centuries and centuries, with the critical experience of trials and errors. There’s very little that’s dogmatic in Buddhism.
“It is an empirical, vigorous science, but the domain of application is the mind. So what’s wrong with that? For me, science is about a rigorous investigation of reality. So here’s the reality of the mind, of how the mind works and ignorance and wisdom and so forth. So that’s it! It’s a domain of investigation.”
Investigating the mind
Ricard has been a devoted student of Buddhism for almost half a century, and a monk and a celibate since he was 30. He has studied with two of the greatest living masters: Kangyur Rinpoche from 1967 until the great man’s death in 1975, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche from 1978 until 1991. The latter, a Vajrayana master, scholar, poet and teacher, was based in Bhutan and was one of the great Buddhist luminaries of the 20th century. “He was a teacher both to the royal family and to the most humble farmer, and travelled all over to teach,” says Ricard. “He was a very remarkable figure. I spent 13 years with him, day and night, serving him as an assistant and receiving teachings, until he passed away.”
While he was living on a shoestring in monasteries, learning from his teachers and spending time in contemplative retreat, Ricard dedicated his spare time to translating 10 Tibetan texts into English and French. During these years, he also built up a relationship with a third wise man: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama often requested teachings from Khyentse Rinpoche, so “we saw him very often and he was very kind to us”.
In a case of synchronicity, Ricard was in France when the Dalai Lama visited to receive the Nobel Prize in 1989 and ended up interpreting for him. Over the past 25 years, the Frenchman has become a close confidant of the Dalai Lama and accompanies him as his advisor on trips to French-speaking countries and to conferences on a topic close to both of their hearts: the conflux of Buddhism and science.
Meditation & the brain
In October 1987, the Dalai Lama sat down with a brilliant Chilean-born, France-based neuroscientist called Dr Francisco Varela, American entrepreneur Adam Engle, six scientists, two translators and a few observers for a week-long dialogue between Buddhism and science. Varela, a dedicated meditator and Buddhist practitioner, was fascinated by the Dalai Lama’s lifelong interest in science. He had founded the non-profit Mind & Life Institute to facilitate meetings between the Dalai Lama, other contemplative practitioners, scientists and scholars, with the vision they would be constructive for science and beneficial for humanity. This encounter was the first of 10 such events held over the course of 15 years.
The dialogues began attracting more attention from leading thinkers and scientists, but in 2000 they gained serious momentum. The Dalai Lama asked the scientists if they would conduct research to see whether contemplative practices were beneficial and, if they were, whether the scientists could find ways to teach them in a secular environment so more people could receive the benefits. Prominent researchers including Varela, psychologist Dr Paul Ekman and Dr Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist who had developed pioneering techniques for measuring brain activity, were present — as was Matthieu Ricard, who was invited by Varela, a dear friend.
With his training in cellular genetics combined with many years of spiritual practice, Ricard was the perfect candidate to help devise and participate in the early experiments and recruit more practitioners. He became a board member of the Institute and “volunteered as a guinea pig” in the research projects conducted at Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He was just one of hundreds of advanced meditation practitioners who Davidson wired up with brain sensors during the initial research, and in numerous experiments since, to see how meditation could change the brain — a concept known as neuroplasticity. Ricard’s individual results were fascinating. When meditating on compassion, his brain produced a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — previously unknown to neuroscience. The scans also showed significantly higher activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to the right, which researchers believed gave him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced proclivity towards negative thinking.
These results grabbed the attention of the popular press worldwide, who dubbed Ricard “the world’s happiest man”. He laughs about it now but he’s embarrassed about the moniker. “There are 7 billion people on the world. How can you know? It’s nonsense. Whenever I go somewhere I say, ‘Please, don’t put that in your blurbs.’ I feel very embarrassed. I have to apologise to my scientist friends. It’s better than being the unhappiest person in the world but it has no scientific basis whatsoever!”
The Mind & Life Institute has played a catalytic role in inspiring researchers to study contemplative neuroscience. “The Mind & Life constellation of researchers wrote the first-ever scientific paper where the word compassion was emphasised,” says Ricard. “But if you look at something that is well known now, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction, I saw a graph of publications in scientific peer reviews. Around 1990 there were two, three papers per year. Last year there were 400 scientific papers related to mindfulness-based stress reduction and, similarly, papers on empathy, compassion, attention, papers on regulating pain … It’s amazing.”
Varela died in 2001 but his protégé Antoine Lutz has carried on his work. Mind & Life now has a research library in the US and a branch in Europe, gives grants to researchers and continues to facilitate dialogue between science and Buddhism. These discussions attract increasingly eminent scientific minds, with Norah Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Cristof Koch, a brilliant neuroscientist and consciousness reductionist, attending recent events.
Ricard, who no longer sits on the Mind & Life board but still participates in research and accompanies the Dalai Lama to its events, is tremendously happy with the attention the institute is receiving from major researchers. “It means contemplative neuroscience. That’s something. It’s not just some hippies and borderline scientists doing bad science. It’s really now getting acknowledged.”
Beyond science
Life hasn’t all been meditation and science for this maroon-robed monk, who lives in the Shechen Monastery in Nepal when he’s not travelling. In addition to his translations, Ricard has written a number of books. He penned his first original work, Animal Relations, in 1969 and compiled the teachings of Khyentse Rinpoche in a photo-book in 1995, but the first title to draw real attention was a combined work with his father.
“In 1997, I’d been 25 years away from everything and someone proposed that I do a dialogue with my late father, Jean-François Revel. I thought he would never accept to do that, but he did accept, enthusiastically. So we met in a pub for two weeks of discussion and from that came The Monk and the Philosopher.”
The book was a hit in Europe. It sold 750,000-odd copies in France alone and was translated into 21 languages, and Ricard was propelled from obscurity into the public limelight. He used the royalties and contacts he made from the book to start a humanitarian foundation, Karuna-Shechen, with friends in 2000. “We started in Tibet, Nepal and India, and now we have accomplished 130 projects,” says Ricard. “We’ve brought about US$13 million to those projects, so they grew bigger and bigger, and now we treat 100,000 patients a year. We have 25,000 kids in the schools we’ve built and we have a whole team.”
Ricard has since authored The Quantum and the Lotus, a dialogue with astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill and Why Meditate? Most recently, he completed The Case for Altruism, a five-year work that was released in France in late 2013 and “started a major debate about ‘Are we altruistic and is this the future of our society?’” Importantly, Ricard’s motivation for writing isn’t to propagate Buddhism but to promote secular ethics. “The Dalai Lama says the same, many, many, many times. He always says, ‘I didn’t come here to make one or two more Buddhists, but to share my experience.’”
A keen photographer since he was a child, Ricard has also published five books of photographs taken during his travels in Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan.
This last pastime, and his humanitarian work, reflect Ricard’s deep love of his adopted home, the Himalayas. He donates all the profits from his books to Karuna-Shechen and France has awarded him one of its top honours, the National Order of Merit, for his work in preserving Himalayan culture.
Returning to retreat
Matthieu Ricard has accomplished a lot in this life but he’s never had a master plan. Instead, he’s stayed open to opportunities to contribute to society, and things have “just happened”. “Really, the core of my life, the truth, has been the inspiration of my teachers, that’s what gave meaning and direction and strength. So everything — even those activities that seem very remote, doing a book on altruism that has a lot of neuroscience, psychology, evolution and all that — is a way to try to express and manifest the inspiration of my teachers in a way that could be useful.
“The Dalai Lama often says about the Mind & Life Institute, ‘Besides all those interesting discussions, what can we contribute to society?’ So I think that in that view … you try to see how you can contribute best.”
What does the future hold for this remarkable and, yes, very happy man? He’s planning to craft an essay from several chapters on animals and ethics that were omitted from The Case for Altruism. He also wants to publish a book of his photography from the past half-century and to start doing translations again.
Not surprisingly, he also has some rest and relaxation in mind. “This past five years was very intense, looking for every possible 10 minutes to finish this 900-page book with 1600 scientific references. And then it had this very intense coming-out in France, so I feel, woo, I’ve bitten off a little bit too much. [It’s] positive stress, in terms of being so involved and engaged and dedicated, but I was doing so much that I felt like an old car and I needed to go into retreat.
“So [now] I’m going to see how I can spend more quiet time. Not that I’m feeling lazy, but I am 68. I am very strong physically and never go see a doctor and have had no medical insurance for 35 years, but I feel … You put too much on a string and you start ‘tk, tk, tk’ breaking from here and there, so it’s too much. Everyone says to me, ‘Are you crazy? Are you trying to kill yourself?’ So I’m trying to be a little bit more reasonable.”
Matthieu Ricard will be speaking at the Happiness & Its Causes conference in Sydney on May 29–30, 2014.
Danielle Kirk is deputy editor of WellBeing.
