“I have no other wish than to be able to die in my hermitage at Namo Buddha, or in a similar place in Tibet or elsewhere,” writes the monk Matthieu Ricard soberly at the end of his memoirs, Notebooks of a wandering monk. Namo Buddha, a village and a monastery suspended at 2565 meters, 40 kilometers from Kathmandu, Nepal, halfway between human suffering and spiritual deliverance … A Google visit is enough to confirm the elevation and the breathtaking horizon.
It is an understatement to say that Matthieu Ricard, the most famous French Buddhist monk, devoted 50 years of his life to the Himalayas, increasing the number of trips, settling sometimes in India, sometimes in Bhutan or Nepal, to go hiking. Dordogne his second homeland. He says he was born in 1967, at the age of 21, in Darjeeling, India.
On the occasion of the publication of Notebooks of a wandering monk, I wanted to talk to the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989 to take stock before his departure from public life, from the gossip and the media circus, to reincarnations of his initial quest. which he prefers to more humbly qualify as “testimony”, unfold from 1967 to today, just before the pandemic.
The man in the saffron robe takes us to the heart of a singular adventure that has nothing to envy of an Alexandra David-Néel, the first Western woman to enter Lhassa. The monk has crossed the hermetic border of Tibet twenty times in the company of his masters and gives us access to the teachings he has received first hand for half a century. It gives us to see a people infatuated with ceremonies and their monks, but closer to nature and the meaning of life, death included.
In my case, I would never have stayed half a century in the Himalayas if I had not met people there who were able to show me this path with discernment and benevolence.
This scientist – he also has a doctorate in genetics – relates in his book several inexplicable events from a neuroscientific or biological point of view and which he has witnessed over the years. Spiritual masters manage to read the minds of the disciples, including those of Matthieu Ricard. Even more disturbing, their bodies remain intact, in a seated position, for a long period of time after their death.
“I am well aware that there is no reasonable scientific explanation for such events. I am simply relating what I experienced. I am not inventing anything and had not smoked the carpet, ”the monk quipped. He adds that our brain contains 300 billion neurons and that this living organ is the most complex on Earth. “Science is an evolving process. But as neuroscientist Wolf Singer told me, “If all of this turns out to be correct, we’re in deep trouble and we need to change the dominant neuroscience paradigm, which is no small feat.” “
Pursuit of happiness and altruism
These notebooks constitute a legacy, that of a 75-year-old man with an unusual destiny who has dedicated his life to bringing the East and the West closer. He did it by speaking, the translations of Tibetan sacred texts, his archived photographs, but also by the intelligence of his gaze and his smile. By his simple presence as a witness.
Ricard first became known thanks to the book The monk and the philosopher, where he conversed with his father, the philosopher Jean-François Revel, in 1997. This time he offers us a very Buddhist work, of a more spiritual material than the previous ones. “It’s not just about happiness and personal development. It’s not a supermarket book, ”he agrees by videoconference from the village of Dordogne where he has been taking care of his 98-year-old mother since the start of the pandemic. She herself lived in Darjeeling for several years and was a Buddhist fellow student alongside her son.
To choose, I prefer to die in my hermitage, with a clear and serene mind, rather than in an airport
“I do not care what will survive me, he says. It was time for me to testify while my brain is still roughly working. And he defends himself well having wanted to flaunt his ego on 750 pages. His ego lodged 3800 meters above it all.
I point out to him that one receives immense waves of benevolence while reading it, as if all this wisdom transpires a little until us. And, of course, we come back to altruism, to which he has already devoted another work. The pandemic has cruelly demonstrated the limits of individualism. “We are deeply interdependent, and our happiness is built with and through others. Selfishness is therefore a lose-lose situation. On the other hand, altruism does good to others – that is its purpose. But, moreover, as a bonus, it is also the best way for those who practice it to make sense of their existence. It is therefore a “win-win” situation. “
Containment and interior paths
Despite the difficulties encountered for almost two years, pandemic obliges, Matthieu Ricard notes a research of the anthropologist Andreas Roepstorff, of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Out of 1,600 testimonies from around the world on the containment experiments, there would have been 48% positive feedback against 16% negative. People used ‘us’ more as well.
“These testimonies mention in particular” finding a tranquility that they lacked in a life overflowing with activities “, a” time for reflection “,” welcome moments spent with loved ones “, and for those who were confined outside the cities, a feeling of reconnection with nature, ”notes the monk, who does not seem surprised by these discoveries, the benefits of which he knows.
On the other hand, maintaining the link with the community seems imperative to him. “In times of crisis, it is important to emphasize our common humanity, to show solidarity and to understand that while we arrived in different skiffs, today we are all in the same boat. “
As for this admirer of Thoreau, he will return to the translation of Tibetan texts and his walks in the Perigord forest while waiting to find his masters, the eternal snows and a consistency that he greatly appreciates. “When I met Tibetan spiritual masters in India, I discovered a perfect consistency between what they taught and what they were. The messenger was also the message. Since then, they have never ceased to inspire my existence. “
Thank you, Mr. Ricard, for being this inspiring messenger for us.