Buddhist monk is world’s happiest man
From TheBuddhism.Net
By MSN News
As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the fresh Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had ever tested.
The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.
“It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” the Frenchman told AFP.
Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.
The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — “never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, Davidson said.
The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.
Research into the phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity”, is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of ground-breaking experiments along with other leading scientists across the world.
“We have been looking for 12 years at the effect of short and long-term mind-training through meditation on attention, on compassion, on emotional balance,” he said.
“We’ve found remarkable results with long-term practitioners who did 50,000 rounds of meditation, but also with three weeks of 20 minutes a day, which of course is more applicable to our modern times.”
The 66-year-old, accompanying other senior Tibetan monks at a festival in the remote Nepalese Himalayan region of Upper Dolpa, has become a globally respected Buddhist and is one of the religion’s leading western scholars.
But he has not always been on the path to enlightenment.
Ricard grew up among the Paris intellectual elite as the son of celebrated French libertarian philosopher Jean-Francois Revel and abstract watercolour painter Yahne Le Toumelin.
“All these people used to come around, most of Paris intellectual life. We had all the French painters and I was myself interested in classical music so I met a lot of musicians,” he said.
“At lunch we’d have three Nobel Prize winners eating with us. It was fantastic… Some of them were wonderful but some could be difficult.”
By the time he got his PhD in cell genetics from the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1972 he had become disillusioned with the dinner party debates and had already begun to journey to Darjeeling in India during his holidays.
Eschewing intimate relationships and a career, he moved to India to study Buddhism and emerged 26 years later as something of celebrity thanks to “The Monk And The Philosopher”, a dialogue on the meaning of life he wrote with his father.
“That was the end of my quiet time because it was a bestseller. Suddenly I was projected into the western world. Then I did more dialogues with scientists and the whole thing started to spin off out of control.
“I got really involved in science research and the science of meditation.”
A prominent monk in Kathmandu’s Shechen Monastery, Ricard divides his year between isolated meditation, scientific research and accompanying the Dalai Lama as his adviser on trips to French-speaking countries and science conferences.
He addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos at the height of the financial crisis in 2009 to tell gathered heads of state and business leaders it was time to give up greed in favour of “enlightened altruism”.
His other works include “Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill” and several collections of photographs of the landscape, people and spiritual masters of the Himalayas.
Ricard donates all proceeds of his books to 110 humanitarian projects which have built schools for 21,000 children and provide healthcare for 100,000 patients a year.
He was awarded the French National Order of Merit for his work in preserving Himalayan culture but it is his work on the science of happiness which perhaps defines him best.
Ricard sees living a good life, and showing compassion, not as a religious edict revealed from on high, but as a practical route to happiness.
“Try sincerely to check, to investigate,” he said. “That’s what Buddhism has been trying to unravel — the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.”
(Source: MSN.com)
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Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer. He has a wonderful career as a scientific researcher But he left everything behind to practice Tibetan Buddhism, living mainly in the Himalayas. He did received awards for his humanitarian work in the East and dedicated his effort and the royalties of his books to various charitable projects in Asia.
He is involved in promoting veganism and animal rights too. He has acted as the French interpreter for the Dalai lama before. Matthieu Ricard is the world’s happiest man ,after neuroscientist Richard Davidson did several testS on him while he meditated on compassion. Davidson discovered that Matthieu Ricard’s brain produced a high level of gamma waves activities resulting an abnormally large capacity for happiness. Fantastic results.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing interesting article.
What I take from this is that, contrary to conventional beliefs that monks are ‘suffering’ by not having all the things a lay person has, and can do as they like within the samsaric sphere is that Monks are truly happy, to have given up everything worldly, having nothing to their name, not property…. Defies logic? Think again.
Oh dear! I think the scientists are blowing it out of proportion because they are making a statement they don’t know about. There are a lot of other people in this world including monks, nuns, yogis, yoginis, High Lamas and so forth. How can he be the happiest when there are so many other practitioners in this world. However, if the comparison is made between this monk and ordinary lay people, I might be inclined to believe this.
However, I am sure the results on the brain scans are authentic and is a result of years of practice I am sure. I believe that but I don’t think he can be any happier than everyone else on this planet because there are many practitioners that may be even more advanced than him and is probably closer to Buddhahood a state beyond ordinary happiness. Happiness after all is just a state of mind and its just up to us to create the causes and mental conditions to achieve happiness.
everything in andrews suite of goodies is given away for free as those who understad and have gladly recieved it with humility and gratitude and for this im so humbled the more i give the less i have the less i have the more i give