They sat on opposite sides of the moderator, two men marked by family resemblance but strikingly different in overall appearance: the father’s head almost bald because of age; the son’s shaved cleanly like a pro basketball player; the father dressed in a business suit with shirt and tie; the son wearing a long flowing robe saffron and dark red.
One of these two men, Jean-François Revel (an assumed name), ranks as one of France’s leading philosophers. Now 75 years old, he enjoys a reputation as a hardheaded secular thinker, a rationalist who trusts reason alone to understand reality.
His son, Matthieu Ricard, has been a Tibetan Buddhist monk for the last thirty years. He believes that only through spirituality can one come to knowledge of the truth. He spends his time in contemplation and other spiritual exercises designed to bring him closer to what is real.
The two had come to Harvard Divinity School to explain and debate their respective world views before a full house of students and interested others. The session was billed as “A Forum on the Meaning of Life” because it offered listeners the chance to compare and contrast radically differing ways of thinking about the world.
Father and son share a deep respect and affection for one another even though they differ profoundly on ways of getting at the truth. What makes the ideological split between them interesting is the earlier career of the monk, Matthieu.
As a young man, he was a brilliant student, schooled in France’s finest educational institutions and brought up in a milieu assuredly non-religious. His success in science led him to enter the professional field of biology where his mentor was François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in biology. In that enterprise his early work gave promise of making him one of France’s top molecular biologists and a young man whose research could prove world-class.
Despite all this success and promise, Matthieu decided to give up that professional field, in fact to give up any career within the limits of the conventional world. Instead, inspired by the Dalai Lama and following in his tradition, he turned to the monastic life of the East.
That was a decision baffling to his father and his professional colleagues. They could not understand why anyone would sacrifice such a brilliant career and leave the world of ordinary life. Even today, the father still evidences some signs of lingering incomprehension.
But the philosopher does see that Buddhism has had notable success in the western world because it answers three questions. 1) What do I know? 2) How shall I live? and 3) How should the city be governed? Revel believes that the first question has been answered by science, the second abandoned, and the third answered by totalitarian systems.
About his sharp change of life, the monk says “I didn’t feel I was jumping from one subject to another. It was a quite natural prolongation of my scientific life.” But in that world he did not see any models of people he would like to be. That’s what seeing the Buddhist monks did for him – – provide models of how to live.
His father, Revel, believes that, since the end of the 17th century, philosophy has abandoned the links between knowledge and morality. And that has led to chaos. Western philosophy, he says, has not prevented totalitarianism, and he points out that Pol Pot, the notorious killer of millions in Cambodia, was a brilliant student at the Sorbonne and a charming young man to boot.
Revel, however, feels critical of Buddhism. He is shocked by what he sees as the superstitious side of Buddhism and finds its theoretical foundations unconvincing. He asks his son: “Why not simply take care of others instead of meditating?”
Someone in the audience asks the monk, “What is the notion of God in Tibetan Buddhism?” Matthieu answers, “boundless love, absolute truth.” He adds that he has derived great happiness from his monastic vocation, but not enlightenment, not yet. What he advises the spiritual striver is: “Don’t hope for swift reward, but practice till your last breath.”
Matthieu’s itinerary reminds me of the poet Robert Frost’s famous lines: “Two paths diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by.” Long ago the monk opted for the spiritual path for his life’s journey rather than the one that leads to worldly success. He chose to follow Eastern mysticism rather than Western rationalism. This fateful decision he seems not at all to regret.
Richard Griffin