LLife is made up of encounters. Matthieu Ricard, the happiest man in the world (established by an American research), perhaps he knows better than anyone. Because he was born twice. The first when he came into the world. The second when he crossed paths with him.
He writes it immediately, at the beginning of his autobiography: “I was born on June 12, 1967, at the age of 21”. That day in Darjeeling, India, he met one of the greatest Tibetan spiritual masters of the time: Kangyur Rinpoche. His life changes.
Matthieu Ricard (Photo by Eric Fougere/Corbis via Getty Images)
French translator of the Dalai Lama
And to think that Ricard, 77 years old, French by origin, writer, photographer and Buddhist monk, French translator of the Dalai Lama, he had already got off to a very good start even if then, of course, only one’s mission in life counts.
However, in his “first” existence, as a boy, in Paris, he had known directly in the living room of the house intellectuals such as director Luis Buñuel and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
With the composer Igor Stravinsky had lunch with us, aged 16, during an interview with a reporter from the New York Times, parent’s friend.
The father, Jean-François Revel, member of the Académie française, writer and journalist, wrote speeches to socialist president François Mitterrand, while his mother Yahne Le Tourmelin was a well-known painter.
He has more than 40,000 hours of meditation behind him
A cosmopolitan pedigree which then led him to become a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “Yet instructive as those encounters were, I felt that there was no correlation between the genius of those exceptional men and their inner nature,” writes Ricard in the memoir Diary of a wandering monk (Piemme).
As if to say: being a talent does not mean being above anger, lust and human passions. Today Ricard is among the most famous “meditators” in the world: in forty years he has accumulated more than forty thousand hours of meditation.
Matthieu Ricard resides in the monastery of Shechen, in Nepal, when he is not around for conferences, talks and official meetings. He has also lived in India, Bhutan and Tibet. He deals with the translation of sacred texts, as well as the preservation of Buddhist culture.
Matthieu Ricard and the Dalai Lama (Photo credit should read REMY GABALDA/AFP via Getty Images)
The fame of the happiest man in the world
Matthieu Ricard has founded schools in Tibet and Nepal, clinics and dispensaries in Nepal and India and contributed to the construction of eight major bridges in Tibet, three of which are suspended. He has just published for Ubiliber (the publishing house of the Italian Buddhist Union). Like a drop of honey, a choice of texts that has all the strength and, indeed, the sweetness of the Buddhist teachings of contemporary masters.
The fame of the happiest man in the world instead earned him from one long research by the University of Wisconsin who applied 256 sensors on his head several times during meditation.
In the left area of his brain a very high level of Gamma waves would have emerged, that is, those connected with positive emotion (and therefore with awareness and well-being). A parameter never recorded before in the neuroscientific literature. A unique case.
(Photo by AKSARAN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Matthieu Ricard: “Happiness is altruism”
How does it feel to be the happiest man alive?
I too answer with a question: how can we know the state of happiness of 8 billion human beings? It’s an invention of the press, of you journalists.
That’s how we are done…
You are unable to resist the temptation to use such a catchy slogan.
What happened then?
Actually, years ago, the Australian TV channel ABC he had aired a series of documentaries about anger, fear and happiness. In one of the final scenes of the film, while walking down a small path along a mountain in Nepal, the author says: “Here is perhaps the happiest person in the world.” A few years later, an English journalist took up that sentence and from that moment on he never abandoned me.
What is happiness really?
For Western culture it equates to a deep sense of well-being and contentment. The pursuit of pleasurable sensations, though, is more a recipe for exhaustion than happiness. It is actually a dulling and pervading state of all experience, and this includes all joy and all pain. True happiness is incompatible with self-centeredness because we are all interdependent on each other. It is found in inner strength, selflessness, wisdom. In a heart that wants everyone to find meaning in their lives and flourish to the best of their ability.
Matthieu Ricard: «Meditation is training of the mind»
Can meditation help?
Meditation is a very buzzword now, but we are actually talking about training the mind. Just as we learn to read and write or play the piano, we need to sharpen our attention span, and then use it to train ourselves in loving-kindness and compassion. We must not underestimate the power of the mind to transform. Whether we like it or not, she can be our best friend or our worst enemy.
Pandemic, energy crisis. Humanity is going through a dark time. For the Apocalypse Clock we are 90 seconds from midnight, i.e. from the catastrophe.
Selflessness is the only answer for this age. It is immoral for the ten richest people to own as much as 25 percent of the poorest people in the world. It shows that the system is highly dysfunctional. We need to reduce these crazy inequalities and make sure everyone can have a life of dignity. We are all brothers and sisters and share the world together.
How should we actually behave?
Don’t always think in terms of “me, me, me”. Otherwise the outside world becomes a threat or just a tool for our interests. And we end up being vulnerable and apprehensive. If we put the ego aside, our mind becomes more spacious and attentive and can turn to the world and to others.
Matthieu Ricard: “The Dalai Lama conquers young people”
(Photo by MOHD ARHAAN ARCHER/AFP via Getty Images)
She left everything: was it difficult?
Actually I didn’t “drop everything”, I understood what was important in life. A bird that comes out of its cage does not “give up” the cage: it simply gains freedom!
What is freedom?
It’s not doing whatever. Thus one is a slave to one’s thoughts. Freedom is mastering one’s mind, just as a captain masters his ship. Mastering it means not letting yourself be overwhelmed by afflictive emotions such as anger, greed or envy.
He is close to the Dalai Lama: what is it like to live together with one of the protagonists of the 21st century?
I have hundreds of anecdotes to tell. One in particular. In Paris, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Dalai Lama took part in a surprise concert by Amnesty International. He took the stage, between two rock songs. Fifteen thousand young people have stopped screaming, in an almost unreal silence. Even filming who was speaking. I’m not very familiar with rock concerts, but does anyone ever yell “shhh” at these events? I doubt it.
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