The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life

by Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard

Conversation is at once the most primitive and the most refined expression of human mind. In this book review I am going to summarize the beautiful conversation between a father and son, two great minds. They discussed how the eastern Buddhism philosophy, a way of life and thinking differs from western philosophy. Ricard, the younger man, a doctor of molecular biology, worked for some time with Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod. Then, still early in his career, he surprised family and friends by leaving Paris for an apprenticeship with Tibetan spiritual masers in Darjeeling, India and now lives in Nepal and devotes much of his time to the Tibetan literatures. Revel, the older man, Ricard’s father, is a philosopher and political commentator.

West’s been a civilization of action, acting on the world to transform it by knowledge of its laws. The knowledge of technological invention, the invention of the steam engine, the use of electricity, the invention of the telescope and the microscope, the use of nuclear energy — for better or for worse, there’s the atom bomb but also nuclear power stations. All that comes from the West. So acting on the world isn’t just a matter of having some spiritual influence on people like oneself, but of a real change in the very substance of the world we live in, and the creation of instruments that were totally unimaginable five centuries ago. These are tools that have radically changed human life. If we’ve understood it properly, Bud­dhism says that action of that sort on the world, in the end, is superflu­ous, doesn’t it? The well-being that the improved living conditions resulting from technological progress bring are certainly not to be despised.

Son, Ricard argues, but experience shows that such progress only solves the secondary problems. You can travel faster, see further, go up higher, go down, lower, and so on.

Father, Revel defends saying live longer, cure more diseases … Again, let’s take a concrete example. In India, next door to here, man’s life expectancy has risen from twenty-nine in 1900 to fifty-three today. Of course, one could say that if a man is too miserable there’s no point in his living long. In that case he’d do better to die at twenty-nine than at fifty-three! But for someone profiting from all these discoveries, his life is both longer and more tolerable. That introduces a dimension that didn’t exist in ancient philosophies. Not to be sick and not to die at twenty-nine is also a way of escaping from suffering. The Western conception of happiness includes, among other things, the prolonging of human life, being able to treat disease more effectively, being able to travel fifty kilometers without having to walk in the mud for two days, and other ‘minor’ aspects of the kind, like not dying of appendicitis at the age of ten, which is probably what would have happened to me had it not been for the invention of modern surgery and antisepsis. If Western-style happiness was of so little interest, why so much frenzy in the East to copy and adopt it?

Son Ricard advocates the idea of the right way is often the middle one. By all means, let’s live a longer life thanks to medical progress, and use it wisely thanks to spiritual values. I’m not trying to minimize the importance of any material progress that allows suffering to be assuaged. The East is grateful to the West for progress in medicine and increased life expectancy. These are things everyone appreciates. But on the other side, a civilization oriented almost exclusively toward that form of action on the world clearly lacks something essential that material progress can never bring — indeed, it’s not what it’s designed to do. The proof is that Western society is now feeling just that, and, with a frenzy that’s sometimes clumsy, is seeking all sorts of recipes for wis­dom borrowed from the East or from the past. That lack appears clearly in the confusion so many minds are plunged into, in the violence that reigns in the inner cities, in the selfishness that governs so many human relationships, in the sad resignation of all those spending their last years in old people’s homes, and in the despair of suicide. If spiri­tual values stop being an inspiration for a society, material progress becomes a sort of facade that masks the pointlessness, of life. Of course, to live longer is to profit from an increased opportunity of giving meaning to life, but if you neglect that opportunity and just aspire to a long and comfortable existence the value of human life becomes alto­gether artificial. Study of the aging process, at a cellular level, has made considerable progress. In the laboratory the lifespan of nematodes and flies can now be doubled. It’s not inconceivable that, one day, it might be possible to double or triple the length of human life. But such a per­spective underlines even more the need to give some meaning to it. Otherwise, we’ll just run the risk of having to live out two hundred years of depression, or three hundred years of bad moods. What’s more, the destructive sides of technological progress have developed no less than its beneficial sides, and in some cases, pollution for exam­ple, have overtaken them.

A particular individual might seem desirable to one person and detestable to another. A politician works hard to exercise power, a hermit to be rid of it. So the pattern of our emotions is determined by the way we perceive reality. Once again, it’s not at all a matter of cutting ourselves off from all human feelings, but of attaining a vast and serene mind that is no longer the plaything of our emotions, which is no longer shaken by adversity or intoxicated by success. If a handful of salt falls into a glass of water, it makes that water undrinkable; but if it falls into a lake it makes hardly any detectable difference. Because of the narrowness of their minds, most people suffer pointlessly all the time from not getting what they want and having to face what they don’t want.

Son, Ricard tries to explain the nature of consciousness that our perception of an object as desirable or undesirable doesn’t reside in the object itself, but in the way we perceive it. There’s no inherent quality in a beautiful object that does the mind any good, nor anything in an ugly object that might harm it. If human beings were to disappear, the phenomenal world wouldn’t necessarily disappear along with them — but the world as it’s perceived by humans would no longer have any basis for its existence. ‘Worlds’ as they’re perceived by other sorts of beings would continue to exist, for them. The classic example is that of a glass of water, which is perceived as a habitat by a fish, as a drink by a human. There’s a Zen poem, too, which says, ‘To her lover, a beautiful woman is a delight; to an ascetic, a distraction; to a wolf, a good meal.’ Although they’re triggered by objects, our perceptions are, in the end, built up by the mind. When we see a mountain, the first image that comes to us is pure, unfabricated perception. But from the second instant onward, some people will think, ‘Oh, that mountain looks dangerous and inhospitable,’ while others might think, ‘That would be a good place to do a retreat.’ Numerous different thoughts will then follow. If objects were defined by themselves and possessed intrinsic qualities, independent of the subject observing them, everyone ought to perceive them in the same way

Power and money don’t bring happiness, that jealousy and pride destroy all the joy in life, and so on. But the fact that it’s commonplace absolutely doesn’t stop us falling all the time into the trap of our usual preoccupations — gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and obscurity — and feeling totally vulnerable to them. It’s not every day that someone tries to stab us in the back, but it’s in every moment that we’re the prey of our negative emotions. How many unhappy people find their lives wrecked by jealousy! If only they were able to recognize how insubstantial that jealousy really was and let it dissolve in their minds like a cloud vanishing in the sky, not only would jealousy leave them in peace but it would certainly never develop to the point of pushing them to commit a crime, as so often happens. Small clouds, as they say, don’t bring rain. It’s when a thought first arises that you have to do something about it, not when the emotions it engenders get completely out of control. If you don’t deal with the spark, what hope do you have of doing something when the whole forest’s on fire?

All living beings possess within themselves the potential to become Buddha, or in other words to attain perfect liberation and wisdom. Everything that veils that potential and prevents it expressing itself is only adventitious and ephemeral. The veils are called ‘ignorance’ or ‘mental obscurations’. So the spiritual path consists of freeing oneself from negative emotions and ignorance and, in so doing, actualizing the perfection that’s already present within us.

According to Buddhism, the conscious isn’t just a more and more complex and perfect development of the inanimate. There has to be a qualitative change there, not just a quantitative one. There’s noth­ing wrong with the observation that the gradually increasing complex­ity of the organization of the nervous system, as forms of life get higher, goes hand in hand with gradually increasing intelligence. But Buddhism holds that even very elementary forms of life are endowed with some form of consciousness — extremely primitive perhaps, but different from matter alone. As you progress up the evolutionary lad­der, the faculty of consciousness becomes more and more effective, deep and developed, culminating in human intelligence. So conscious­ness is manifested to a varying extent in different supporting mecha­nisms and in different conditions. So where would that consciousness come from, even the very primitive one in some microscopic creature. Buddhism answers that by saying that it can only come from a previous life, according to the law of 'conservation of consciousness' analogous to the conservation of energy in the world of matter. That's not, of course, what science would think at all. Science sees man as an animal among the other animals, an animal in whom one dimension of perceptual consciousness has been particularly developed because of the development of the brain. But it's true that the great mystery, or rather the great leap in the vision of modern science, is the passage from matter to life. When we ask ourselves whether there could be life in other solar systems, in other galaxies, or even on Mars, we're always trying to find out, basically, if the set of factors that have led to the chemical reactions that produced life within matter might have been able to happen on other planets or in other solar systems. But the shift from animal or vegetable life to conscious­ness over the evolution of living species is perhaps rather less mysteri­ous than the shift from matter to life.

The West has produced antibiotics that save human lives, and Tibet has spent its time giving meaning to existence. The ideal of medicine is to allow everyone to live to a hundred or more without losing any teeth. The goal of the spiritual path is to eliminate any trace of pride, jealousy, hatred, cupidity, and so on from the current of consciousness, and become incapable of doing anything harmful to others. Our West­ern society, by and large, is no longer oriented toward quests of that kind; to us they seem out of reach. Why not combine both approaches? There’s nothing to stop a sage using the benefits of medicine, or air travel, but he’d never give such conveniences the same importance as the spiritual quest. Spiritual and temporal can be combined in an intel­ligent and constructive way, as long as one remains aware of their respective importance.

We’ve already seen how thoughts can be disciplined by apply­ing antidotes specific to the different negative emotions, but also — and it’s a more fundamental method-you can liberate a thought by watching it at the moment it arises, tracing it to its source, and observ­ing its complete lack of substantiality. The moment you begin to watch it like that, it dissolves like a rainbow fading into space. That’s what’s called ‘liberating’ or ‘untying’ a thought, in the sense that it’ll no longer trigger a chain reaction of further thoughts. Thoughts vanish without leaving a trace, and are no longer translated into the words and actions that are the usual expression of an emotion — anger, desire, and so on. Whatever the circumstances, you no longer fall under the sway of your thoughts. You become like an expert horseman, who might at first have found it hard to stay in the saddle, but later on, like a Tibetan rider, can even pick up an object from the ground at full gallop without falling off.

Quotation from Erwin Schrödinger, the great physicist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1933? ‘The image of the world around us that science provides is highly deficient. It supplies a lot of factual information, and puts all our experience in magnificently coherent order, but keeps terribly silent about everything close to our hearts, everything that really counts for us.

What might best fulfill human needs? Science? Spirituality? Money? Power? Pleasure? No one can answer such ques­tions without also asking themselves what mankind aspires to most deeply, and what the very purpose of life might be. Buddhism’s answer to that question is to point out that finally what we all seek in life is happiness. But it is important not to misunderstand the apparent simplicity of that observation. Happiness, here, is not just some agree­able sensation but the fulfillment of living in a way that wholly matches the deepest nature of our being. Happiness is knowing that we have been able to spend our life actualizing the potential that we all have in us, and to have understood the true and ultimate nature of the mind. For someone who knows how to give meaning to life, every instant is like an arrow flying toward its target. Not to know how to give meaning to life leads to discouragement and a sense of futility that may even lead to the ultimate failure, suicide. Happiness necessarily implies wisdom. Without wisdom, it would be impossible to put right the principal cause of what we perceive as unhappiness - that is, persistent dissatisfaction dominating the mind. That dissatisfaction comes from an inability to overcome the mental poisons of hatred, jealousy, attachment, greed, and pride, which arise from an ego-centered vision of the world and from the attachment to the idea of a self that is so powerful in us.