Almost a decade after my first visit to Leonard Cohen’s perch in the bare hall near the top of the mountain, I ran into another unlikely maverick, this time in Zürich. I was in the Hallenstadion, a thirteen-thousand-seat auditorium recently visited by Britney Spears, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, on whose global movements I was writing, was delivering a complex discourse on the Bodhisattva’s way of life, explaining why some humans who attain Nirvana (the word means “blown out” in Sanskrit) choose to come back to the world to help the rest of us.
Many of the native English speakers there—mostly Buddhist, as I am not—were trying, if they could, to follow the intricate philosophical teachings in French, in part because the Dalai Lama’s words came through his French translator with such lucid transparency. The translator’s name was Matthieu Ricard, and he’d received his PhD in molecular biology from the Institut Pasteur, studying under the Nobel Prize winner François Jacob. Indeed, Matthieu’s father, Jean-François Revel, was celebrated as one of France’s leading intellectuals, the longtime editor of L’Express; his mother, Yahne le Toumelin, was well known for her abstract art. Around the family dinner table, while Matthieu was growing up, sat Buñuel and Stravinsky and Cartier-Bresson.
But when he was twenty-one, Ricard took a trip to Nepal, and the joy and sense of discernment he’d encountered in and through some Tibetan lamas there had so profoundly moved him that, five years on, he abandoned his promising career in science and went to live in the shadow of the Himalayas. He learned Tibetan, took on monastic robes, and served—for more than a dozen years—as attendant and student of the Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. At one point in the mid-1990s, Matthieu’s father flew to Nepal to spend ten days in dialogue with his scientist son to find out why his offspring would write (much as Leonard Cohen might) that “Simplifying one’s life to extract its quintessence is the most rewarding of all the pursuits I have undertaken.”
The book that arose out of their discussions, The Monk and the Philosopher, sold almost half a million copies in France, in part because Ricard was able to argue for the Buddhist “science of mind” he had taken on with all the Cartesian clarity and eloquence he’d no doubt inherited from his father. No one I’d met could better explain, for example, how getting caught up in the world and expecting to find happiness there made about as much sense as reaching into a fire and hoping not to get burned.
Just before I met him, Ricard had been the first participant in an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. Scientists had attached 256 electrodes to the skulls of hundreds of volunteers and put them through a three-and-a-half-hour continuous functional MRI scan to test for positive emotions (and, in later experiments, compassion, the ability to control emotional responses, the capacity to process information). The subjects were similar in every respect except that some had given themselves over to a regular practice of stillness and the others had not. Ricard’s score for positive emotions was so far beyond the average of nonmonastic subjects that the researchers, after testing many others who had meditated for ten thousand hours or more and many who had not, felt obliged to conclude that those who had sat still for years had achieved a level of happiness that was, quite literally, off the charts, unseen before in the neurological literature.
By the time we met in Zürich, the fifty-nine-year-old Frenchman was routinely described as “the happiest man in the world.” He was also in constant demand, explaining how happiness can be developed just as any muscle can be at the World Economic Forum in Davos, participating in conferences between scientists of matter and of mind in India, translating for the Dalai Lama across the globe, bringing the priorities he’d sharpened in stillness to the construction of clinics and schools and bridges across Tibet. Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler’s question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. “For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky,” Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn’t strike everyone. “There’s nothing I can do, so it’s really quite liberating. There’s nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It’s beautiful.” Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.
His explanation made a different kind of sense a few years later, when Ricard published a book of photographs that looked to me like the ultimate travel book. He’d been on retreat in a cabin on top of a mountain in Nepal for the better part of a year, and once or twice a week, he’d stepped outside and taken a picture of what lay beyond his front door. The same view, more or less, but as it changed with clouds or rain, in winter or in spring, and as the moods of the man behind the lens changed.
When I paged through the book, I realized Matthieu had inherited his mother’s eye for the art of stillness as well as his father’s analytical mind; these Portraits of Nowhere, as they could have been called, were magical. I saw Indonesia and Peru, sunlit valleys and storm-blackened skies in his work; it felt as if most of the world had made a house call to his cabin. The book, which he called Motionless Journey, might almost have been an investigation into how everything changes and doesn’t change at all—how the same place looks different even as you’re not really going anywhere.
But what made it most haunting was that, at heart, it was a description of an inner landscape. This is what your mind—your life—looks like when you’re going nowhere. Always full of new colors, sights, and beauties; always, more or less, unaltered.
~~The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere -by- Pico Iyer
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