In these anxious times, what can we learn from 'the world’s happiest man'?
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In these anxious times, what can we learn from 'the world'south happiest man'?
Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama'due south French interpreter, spent five years of his life in contemplative retreat in the Himalayas. His advice for the residue of u.s.: Make peace with your mind.
Tibetan Spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, listens to his translator, French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. (Photo: AFP/Patrick Hertzog)
After so long under lockdown, what better lunch companion than the "happiest human being in the globe"? Matthieu Ricard pops up on my iPhone screen, instantly recognisable by his warm smiling and dark red and orangish monastic robes.
The 74-year-former biologist-turned-Buddhist, the French interpreter to the Dalai Lama, gained the epithet – which, by the fashion, he thinks cool – in the 2000s, afterwards taking office in a 12-year study on the long-term bear on of meditation. Through decades of training, he was plant to have significantly altered the construction of his encephalon. The results sent camera crews rushing to the Himalayas to discover his secret (spoiler alert: There isn't one – it's a lifetime of hard piece of work). And it later led the media to christen him "the globe's happiest man".
Ricard is the ideal guest for these broken-hearted times. He has an intimate knowledge of solitude, having spent a total of five years of his life in contemplative retreat. He'due south the get-go to admit that "confinement, of course, for me it's a wonderful affair". His advice for the residue of us? "Make peace with your own mind . . . and so the time will not feel and then heavy and so hard."
In a nod to Ricard's stints in retreat, I accept come to a remote sanctuary of my own: A small hut in the hills nigh my abode in south-west Scotland. Information technology is roughly the same size as the three-metre-square refuge in Nepal where he spends months on end.
We begin with a virtual tour of our corresponding surroundings. "I always wanted to go to Scotland to take photographs," said Ricard, who has travelled to the likes of Patagonia, Iceland and Yukon in n-w Canada to photograph their wild landscapes, with his images praised past legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Ricard eyes the little hut where I take laid a small wooden table for lunch. "It looks similar a hermitage," he said approvingly. A cuckoo calls in the distance; closer by is the sound of bleating lambs on the hillside.
"If this had been last calendar week, I could have shown you the entire Himalayan mountain range with four eight,000-metre peaks," he added. "Only now information technology'southward by and large French forest, which is beautiful, but doesn't take the aforementioned dimensions."
Nearly a calendar week before our see in early May, Ricard left the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal on the final flight out of the country organised by the French diplomatic mission there. He returned to Dordogne in s-west France to be with his 97-year-old mother. Now he is sitting on her balcony, fugitive entering the business firm during a 14-day quarantine period. I catch a glimpse of her inside. "Hello maman," Ricard waved. "Maman, on t'a dit bonjour de l'Écosse."
'I Call back WE SHOULD BE VERY Apprehensive'
Lunch does not normally feature prominently in my companion's routine. His tardily father wrote an anthology of gastronomy (Culture and Cuisine: a Journey Through the History of Food), merely, said Ricard, "I am totally the opposite. I do not remember ten minutes later on what I ate. I'yard really non interested."
I reach for my flask and pour a mug of steaming leek and potato soup. Ricard is vegetarian – "I don't desire to alive on the suffering and the expiry of other animals" – and he has in front of him a unproblematic salad starter of lettuce, grated carrot and corn blinis.
What does Ricard make of coronavirus and the global confinements to halt its spread? "I think we should be very humble," he said. "In that location are people who take tremendous difficulties, financial difficulties, health difficulties, family difficulties. It would be pretentious to say anything most that because they are facing incredible hardship." Yet "there is a whole category of people who are doing quite OK materially" only who are still disoriented. A submicroscopic speck has overthrown us, "shattering an illusion that modern man has built up."
The notion that nosotros can control external weather is mistaken, he explained, gesticulating with a corn blini on his fork for emphasis. "We have this very arrogant idea that nosotros have extracted ourselves from nature. We are masters of the universe, nosotros can transport people to the Moon, we can dispense genes. It seems that we are invincible."
He is horrified, too, by the thought of transhumanism, and its adherents' quest to prolong dramatically the homo lifespan. "Imagine Donald Trump being elected for the 50th time or Lionel Messi scoring his 50,000th goal. How boring!" I laugh in agreement. He went on: "I mean, I love my hermitage, but a chiliad years? As my mother likes to say, eternity is awfully long, especially near the stop."
"We have this very arrogant thought that we accept extracted ourselves from nature. We are masters of the universe, we can ship people to the Moon, nosotros can manipulate genes. It seems that we are invincible." – Matthieu Ricard
THE PATH TO BUDDHISM
Ricard's path to Tibetan Buddhism began far from the Himalayas, in Savoie, south-eastern France. He grew upwardly in and near Paris, raised agnostic past parents who were at the centre of French intellectual life. His father, Jean-Francois Revel, was a political commentator who became famous for his challenges to both communism and Christianity; his female parent, Yahne le Toumelin, is an abstractionist painter.
Through his parents' circles, Ricard's upbringing was spent socialising with some of the great artists of the 24-hour interval: Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and Spanish film-maker Luis Bunuel, to proper name merely a few. "I was more interested in watching birds and playing music and football, merely I was there at dinner then I saw them, and listened roughly to their word," Ricard recalled.
He struggled to find the role model he was looking for. "I realised after, when I tried to figure out why, that there was no correlation between their particular skills or genius and existence a good human being being." He gives an extreme instance: One of his father'southward best friends was the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. "He became crazy and killed his wife."
Ricard was 20 when he watched a documentary virtually Tibetan Buddhist masters and "saw that in that location were xx St Francis of Assisi, 20 Socrates who were alive today." He travelled to Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, where his conversion to Tibetan Buddhism began. Ricard credits his mother with instilling in him an interest in "spirituality at large" during his childhood. In return he urged her to go to Republic of india to experience "a living tradition . . . not merely in books." She followed his advice and, remarkably, also abandoned French bohemia and became a Tibetan Buddhist nun.
While Ricard completed a PhD in cell genetics at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, each summer he would return to the mountains. Every bit soon as he finished his doctorate in the early 1970s, he moved to the Himalayas.
It was through 1 of his teachers that Ricard first met the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. After several years of knowing each other, the Dalai Lama asked Ricard – who is fluent in French, English and Tibetan – to go his French interpreter. "Information technology was wonderful because it's so astonishing to be with him intimately. The primary affair is that the Dalai Lama is exactly the same with a head of state and with the lady who cleans the hotel," said Ricard.
He recalled accompanying him to meet the late French president Francois Mitterrand at the Elysee Palace. "Commonly, later on the meeting, yous arrive the car and the president says goodbye and you get. But the Dalai Lama went all around the courtyard to shake hands with the guards, tap them on the shoulder, express joy with them. Mitterrand didn't know whether to stay or go dorsum in." The Dalai Lama lives in India, in permanent exile from Tibet. Ricard won't be drawn on Tibet's relations with Mainland china: "I actually hope I can go back to Tibet before I dice."
UNSOLICITED FAME
It wasn't until 1997 that Ricard became a household name in France, when he co-authored a book with his father, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Begetter and Son Discuss the Significant of Life. It was framed as an east-meets-westward discussion on the preoccupations that are as former as humankind: The pregnant of life, consciousness, liberty and suffering.
At the time, Revel was a well-known French thinker and journalist, merely his son was a relative unknown. The book became a bestseller in Europe and was translated into 23 languages. "That was a big change," he said. "It was either the get-go of my problem, or the beginning of an opportunity, I don't know.
"It shows you how completely artificial glory tin be considering nobody knows anything near you lot and then suddenly within weeks they cease yous in the street. I'thou like shooting fish in a barrel to recognise because I'm like a walking flag with this monk dress."
Every bit nosotros finish our starters, we plow to the theme with which he is perhaps near synonymous: Happiness. His 2004 TED talk "The habits of happiness" has been viewed more than nine million times. In information technology, he makes the stardom betwixt happiness every bit something that can be learnt and cultivated, and pleasure, which is anchored in time and place, and exhausts itself as you experience it.
"There is a tendency today to look for hedonic happiness," he tells me, pointing to obsessions with status, wealth and image; and the growth of social media, which he describes as a "window for narcissism".
Hedonic happiness "usually ends up in failure. It is similar a treadmill. Yous are never satisfied, you ever desire more. If you have one, you want two."
Ricard advocates cultivating mental resilience and happiness – or what Aristotle called eudaemonia, the condition of human flourishing – by heed training through meditation. He took part in a study led by Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that showed how meditation can, over time, alter networks in the brain and improve emotional and physical wellbeing. Researchers hooked up Ricard's head to 128 sensors and institute that when he meditated on pity, he produced levels of brain gamma waves far outside the normal range, in areas of the brain associated with positive emotions, benevolence and wellbeing.
What does Ricard make of the "world's happiest man" moniker? "It's the biggest joke in the world," he said. "How can scientists know virtually 7 billion human beings' level of happiness? This is crazy. And there's no fashion you lot tin can compare people." He added: "I suppose it's meliorate to exist called that than the unhappiest person in the earth, but information technology still doesn't make sense."
He is oftentimes asked what is the "underground" to meditation. "There is nothing highly mysterious about information technology, but it requires exercise," said Ricard. "Any solution that is fast and easy, achievable in five points and in 3 weeks, forget it. It'south like learning the piano, you have to practise . . . There'southward no secret. It's a whole life, but information technology's worth doing."
As lockdowns starting time to be eased, policymakers confront the challenge of trying to rebuild fractured economies. Some see this as an opportunity to promote a green economic recovery; others maintain that carbon taxes and policies damage growth and jobs, and telephone call for putting the climate transition on concur.
Ricard is unequivocal: We have to address climate change – "the major claiming of the 21st century" – now. The benefits of quick and decisive action to tackle it far outweigh the economic costs of not acting.
Information technology has clouded over exterior the hut; a pair of mallard ducks land on the loch below. Inside, my dejeuner guest is condign blithe, as he outlines how the response to the public wellness emergency has shown that "governments and leaders can take quite drastic measures and that people are set to follow".
He added: "And so why can't they use the same amount of determination to address even greater bug similar the environs, climatic change, global warming and loss of biodiversity? All of this is potentially a much greater crusade of suffering."
His plea is for firsthand action. "The future doesn't hurt, not yet. The problem with the environment is that when it hits united states of america badly, it's too tardily."
The moment is broken by the beep of Ricard's mobile, signalling that his battery is running depression. "Oh wow, I've been heavy in consumption today," he laughed.
Conversation turns to the months ahead. Ricard has spent decades photographing and cataloguing Himalayan texts and paintings, and plans to return to the mountains in the autumn. He has stepped dorsum from the day-to-day running of his 20-yr-old humanitarian foundation, which provides healthcare, teaching and social services in India, Nepal and Tibet. Now he is writing "a testimony of what it is to spend years with the dandy Buddhist teachers".
"I don't accept huge plans," said Ricard. "I'm 74 so information technology's time to go dorsum to the hermitage. I don't want to die on an aeroplane, I want to have a few years of peaceful life. It's time to rejoice and set up for death in peace and joy. A good decease is the crowning of a good life, hopefully."
The composure with which he faces his adjacent affiliate reflects the Buddhist belief in death every bit a natural part of the life bike. Many people in modern western societies are unprepared for death because "they accept non pondered the fragility of human being life too much," said Ricard. "And they are not used to cultivating those inner qualities that make you lot face expiry with repose.
"In Buddhism, nosotros think about death all the fourth dimension. It is not morbid; it is but to give value to every moment that passes past. Why do so many people who have been given a year left to live considering of a terminal illness often say that it was the richest year of their life?" Considering it draws into sharp relief all they hold precious, I propose. "You can appreciate that all your life," says Ricard. "That is the best manner. Thinking of death is just to capeesh every moment."
"In Buddhism, we recollect about decease all the time. It is not morbid; it is simply to give value to every moment that passes by." – Matthieu Ricard
By Harriet Agnew © 2022 The Financial Times
READ> In an age of safe distancing, here'south how to appreciate the joys of slow living
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Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/people/what-can-we-learn-from-the-world-s-happiest-man-matthieu-ricard-247836
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