East Meets West as Father, Son Explore Beliefs

Over a 10-day period in May 1996, two men met daily in Hatiban, Nepal. There, at an inn overlooking the valley of Katmandu, they talked. For hours, they talked about being and nothingness; about the Stoics, Epicureans, Plato and Immanuel Kant; about the Buddha and the Dalai Lama; about suffering and altruism; about Freud and modern China; about the West and the East.

One of the two men is a French philosopher, famous in France for his essays on politics but with a following throughout Europe and the United States. The other is a Buddhist monk born in France, trained as a molecular biologist, who left a promising academic career to devote himself to Tibetan Buddhism. The two men wanted to understand each other; they wanted to explore the convergences of their world views and the divergences. They talked because they believe that the philosophical traditions of the West and the spiritual traditions of Buddhism each represent distinct and not always compatible approaches to life. And, of course, they talked because they are joined by more than intellectual curiosity. They are joined by blood. The philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel, is Matthieu Ricard’s father.

At heart, then, “The Monk and the Philosopher” is a book about a father and son attempting to figure each other out, but Revel and Ricard are no ordinary father and son. Although they are not estranged, they are acutely aware of how far their respective paths have diverged, and the conversation resonates with unspoken bonds. Fortunately, their dialogue is erudite and lively. It is also dense and often arcane. They have spent decades delving into their respective disciplines, and it shows. At any given moment, Revel will invoke Zeno the Stoic or a treatise by Leibnitz. In return, Ricard calls on the Tibetan “Book of the Dead” or the writings of one rinpoche (teacher) or another. They dance from topic to topic, always circling back to the same questions of philosophy’s moral imperatives and Buddhism’s spiritual ones.

They spend hours, for instance, sparring over the definition of “emptiness,” a central concept of Buddhism and a problem for Western philosophy. Ricard explains that emptiness is actually unlimited potential that allows for unconditional altruism. Revel objects that emptiness alone does nothing to improve the material condition of most human beings, that only the West with its focus on improving the material world has developed antibiotics and machines that have vastly improved the human condition. Ricard admits that “Western efficiency is a major contribution to minor needs,” and Revel responds incredulously” “Minor needs! . . . If Western-style happiness was of so little interest, why so much frenzy in the East to copy and adopt it?” Ricard parries that material wealth hasn’t made many in the West happy or satisfied. Yes, admits his father, but the achievements of science and philosophy are hardly inconsequential. And so the dialogue continues.

They conclude their 10-day conversation with some parting thoughts. Revel is impressed with Buddhism “as a system of wisdom” but, as a “convinced atheist,” he remains skeptical about it “as a system of metaphysics.” Ricard believes that “no dialogue, however enlightening it might be, could ever be a substitute for the silence of personal experience.”

The conversations are at once fascinating and dense, provocative and pedantic. The book was originally published in France, where it stayed on the bestseller list for more than eight months. It is hard to imagine it attracting such an audience in any other country. What’s especially striking about “The Monk and the Philosopher” from an American perspective is how French the discussion is. Ricard the monk asserts that Buddhism “offers us a science of the mind” that helps “us become better human beings.” Revel talks of philosophy as at best a system of lived ethics. Fair enough, yet many Tibetan Buddhists would reject the description of Buddhism as a “science of the mind,” and many American philosophers would not focus on philosophy as an ethical system.

What this book offers, then, is a portrait of Buddhist thought and Western philosophy refracted through the dual prisms of French intellectual culture and a father-son relationship. Thankfully, neither Revel nor Ricard attempts a pat resolution to their complex history together. As a reminder of archetypal questions that fill our waking days, the book is a success. As a guide to either Buddhism or to Western philosophy, however, it falls shorter of the mark than either the father or the son seems to realize.