(1949 Francia)
Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who resides in the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling monastery in Nepal.
He was born in Paris. He is the son of the renowned French philosopher Jean-François Revel (Jean-François Ricard) and the painter Yahne Le Toumelin, so he grew up surrounded by the ideas and personalities of French intellectual circles. He traveled to India for the first time in 1967.
He obtained his PhD in Molecular Biology at the Pasteur Institute under the sponsorship of Nobel Laureate François Jacob. After finishing his doctoral thesis in 1972, Ricard decided to abandon his scientific career and concentrate on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived in the Himalayas and was a disciple of Kangyur Rinpoche, a teacher of an ancient Buddhist school of the Nyingma tradition. He later became a close disciple of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche until his death in 1991. Since then, he has devoted his efforts to completing the vision of Khyentse Rinpoche.
Ricard’s photographs of the spiritual masters, the landscape and the people of the Himalayas have been published in numerous books and magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson said about his work: “Matthieu’s spiritual life and his camera are one, making his images fleeting and eternal.”
Matthieu is the author and photographer of Journey to Enlightenment and Monk Dancers of Tibet and the photobook Buddhist Himalayas as a collaborator, as well as the recent Tibet, an Inner Journey (Tibet, a trip to the interior). He is also the translator of numerous Buddhist texts including The Life of Shabkar. The Monk and the Philosopher, a book that includes a dialogue with his father Jean-François Revel, was a best-seller in Europe and was translated into 21 languages, and “The Infinity in the Palm of the Hand” (The Quantum and the Lotus ), in collaboration with Trinh Xuan Thuan) reflects his interest in the relationship of science and Buddhism. His latest book, “In Defense of Happiness” (Cultivating Life’s Most Important Skill) also became a best-seller in France.
Member of the “Mind and Life Institute”, and a frequent participant in meetings and collaborative development among Buddhist scientists and students, his contributions have appeared in “Working with Destructive Emotions”, edited by Daniel Goleman and in many other essay books. He is involved in the study and development of the effects of mental training on the brain at the universities of Madison-Wisconsin, Princeton and Berkeley. In one of these studies at the University of Wisconsin, researchers placed 256 electrodes on their skull and subjected them to a functional imaging apparatus by nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It was found that Matthieu Ricard achieved the highest level of activity in the left pre-frontal cerebral cortex, which is associated with positive emotions. The scale varies from + 0.3 to -0.3 (beatitude), Matthieu Ricard achieved results of -0.45, completely outside the scale. A level never recorded in another human being.
The results of this study, published in 2004 by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, constitute the fifth scientific reference most consulted in history.
He has also participated in studies and discussions at the Universities of Harvard, in the US, Maastricht in the Netherlands and Leipzig in Germany.
France awarded him the National Order of Merit for his humanitarian work in the East. During the last years, Ricard has dedicated its efforts and the economic benefits of its publications to several development and assistance projects in Asia, including the construction and maintenance of clinics, schools and orphanages. Since 1989, he has served as a French interpreter and personal adviser to the fourteenth Dalai Lama: Tenzin Gyatso being one of the first European monks to speak and translate the Tibetan language.
Links
Some of his photos:
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