NEWS FEATURE: From Stoicism to Buddhism: A father and son search for common ground

c. 1999 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard are father and son, and they look it. Both have round, full faces and bald pates; both tend to sit with arms folded across their chests; both wear reading glasses. Both also are men of great intellect and prodigious creative ability who […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard are father and son, and they look it. Both have round, full faces and bald pates; both tend to sit with arms folded across their chests; both wear reading glasses.

Both also are men of great intellect and prodigious creative ability who concern themselves with life’s ultimate questions _ truth, happiness, the meaning of it all. But in their quests for understanding, Revel and Ricard are of two minds, not to mention very different outward styles.


Revel, 74, is one of France’s leading philosophers and political journalists, a confirmed atheist rooted in classical Greek thought, a paragon of the liberal Western man of letters. In New York for a series of appointments, he stayed at Park Avenue’s tony Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Ricard, 52, is a former molecular biologist who in his 20s abandoned science for Tibetan Buddhism, Paris for Nepal, his father’s grey business suits for a monk’s burgundy robes. In New York, he preferred to bunk at a friend’s Greenwich Village apartment.

Yet they remain linked by blood and fate, and together they have produced”The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life”(Schocken). The book, a bestseller in France and in print in 18 languages, is newly published in the United States.

Publishers Weekly called it”a dazzling intellectual tete-a-tete on metaphysics, morality and meaning.”Columbia University’s Robert Thurman, a leading Western academic on Tibetan Buddhism and a former monk himself, called it”a paradigm of the kind of intelligent conversation that is possible between East and West when the conversationalists take the subject very seriously.””The Monk and the Philosopher”is a record of 10 days of conversation that Revel and Ricard conducted in 1996 at an inn in the Himalayan mountains outside Katmandu, the Nepalese capital that Ricard calls home. Revel played the critical but loving father who probes for holes in the son’s defense of who he has become. Ricard’s role was that of the respectful but expert son desirous of paternal understanding.

Despite a quarter-century having passed since Ricard’s decision to immerse himself in Buddhism, it was the first time father and son had discussed the subject in depth.”We had never had the occasion to talk deeply about our ideas,”said Ricard, who has had no such difficulty with his mother, the painter Yahne le Toulelin, long divorced from Revel. She, too, became a Tibetan Buddhist and lives today in a Buddhist community in southern France.

Buddhism _ particularly the Tibetan form _ currently enjoys celebrity status in the West. In part, that’s because of the charismatic personality of its principal spokesman, the exiled Dalai Lama, and the support his political campaign to free Tibet of Chinese control enjoys in many Western capitals.

However it’s also because of Buddhism’s attractiveness to many in the West who no longer believe in the personal God of the Abrahamic traditions. Non-theistic Buddhism _ with its emphasis on harnessing the power of thought and the individual realization of ultimate truth _ has replaced church and synagogue for many such people.


In France, Buddhists are now the third-largest religious group after Catholics and Muslims and ahead of Protestants and Jews. In the United States, according to Diana Eck, a Harvard University professor of comparative religion, hundreds of thousands _ most of them well-educated members of the middle class _ have accepted the 2,500-year-old tradition. Countless others have informally incorporated Buddhist meditative techniques into their lives.”Who is attracted to Buddhism? I’d say people who have the leisure to consider life,”said Ricard.”Buddhism is a science of introspection that needs time for intellectual reflection.” The steady stream of books about Buddhism available today reflects its growing appeal. But Ricard said many such volumes amount to Buddhism-lite _ simplistic New Age formulas that speak of inner-peace but soft-pedal the many years of rigorous spiritual discipline required by traditional Buddhist training.”The Monk and the Philosopher”is different. Both Revel and Ricard condone no intellectual shortcuts.”What strikes me more and more is how mankind is pretending to look for the truth but acts as if it hates the truth,”said Revel, a pen name the father now uses exclusively.

Yet for all its heady discussion of the similarities between Buddhist thought and ancient Greek Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, the nature of consciousness and material reality, the book’s”spark,”as Revel put it, is the authors’ unbreakable familial connection.”It gave embodiment to abstract ideas,”he said.

Revel, the author of such highly regarded critiques of communism and Christianity as”Without Marx or Jesus”and”The Totalitarian Temptation,”confessed his early disappointment at his son’s”radical”decision to give up a highly promising scientific career to head East.

Ricard, who often acts as the Dalai Lama’s French-language translator and whose Buddhist name is Konchog Tendzin, responded by saying his scientific career was”the result of a passion for discovery”that he soon realized left him spiritually unsatisfied.”Science, however interesting, wasn’t enough to give meaning to my life,”said Ricard, who has also published a lavish coffee-table photo book,”Journey to Enlightenment”(Aperture), about his travels with his Buddhist spiritual teacher in Bhutan, India and Nepal.

In searching for meaning, Ricard said he gravitated toward Buddhism”simply out of circumstances.” Although the son was baptized a Catholic _”I let the old ladies of the family take care of it. I remained at the cafe in front of the church,”said Revel _ Ricard was raised with no religious background. If there was any religious content to Ricard’s childhood, it was”anti-cleric.””It’s an old tradition in France,”said Revel.”It goes back to Voltaire.” Feeling the need for inner direction, Ricard did what so many other young Westerners did in the 1960s. He went to India. There, he said, he encountered”a series of remarkable men”_ exiled Tibetan Buddhist masters who seemed to him to embody their teachings.”Had I met St. Francis of Assisi I would have become a Franciscan. But I didn’t,”Ricard said during a recent joint interview with his father in New York, the starting point of a cross-country book promotion tour.

After first dismissing Buddhism as irrelevant, Revel has come to regard it as a worthy successor to Greek philosophy. Buddhism, he said,”fills a gap left vacant by the desertion of Western philosophy in the areas of ethics and the art of living.” The ancient Greeks, said Revel,”sought wisdom for its pragmatic value … For a philosopher of the time the goal was to become a good person, to attain salvation and happiness by living a good life, and at the same time, as much as by example as by teaching, to show the path of wisdom to all those wishing to follow.” Today, philosophy has been largely relegated to academia, he said. Meanwhile, socialism and other utopian political systems have failed, and science”has gone its own way and evolved independently, but without giving rise to any system of ethics or wisdom,”Revel added.”It is that vacant ground that Buddhism now occupies, all the more easily in the absence of any local competition,”he said.


Even as the father has come to accept the worth of the son’s endeavors, he has retained his utter disbelief in what he labeled Buddhism’s”system of metaphysics.”Reincarnation, karma and other such Buddhist concepts remain, for Revel,”unproved and unprovable.” For him, Buddhism’s value is as a”helpful hypothesis”_ a guide to ethical behavior and individual happiness.

Ricard, as expected, exited the encounter with his father holding firm to Buddhism’s esoteric beliefs.

Buddhism, he said,”doesn’t claim any monopoly of the truth, nor to have discovered something new. It’s not a matter of constructing dogma, but of using a science of the mind to bring about both a transformation of the individual and a realization of the ultimate nature of things through contemplation.” Still, said Ricard, just finding common ground with his father was enough to make the exercise worthwhile.”It was a great joy to be able to explain to my father what’s important to me. Ideas for the both of us are at the center of our lives,”he said.

Sitting in the Waldorf-Astoria’s opulent lobby, an environment that Ricard said makes him uncomfortable _”I’m used to living in a small hut in the mountains”_ the son sipped milky tea and spoke of what his father might not have ever accepted.”Had I grown up to be stupid it would have been much worse for him,”said Ricard.

DEA END RIFKIN

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