Matthieu Ricard

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Matthieu Ricard (born 1946) is a Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal.

Portrait taken in 1999

Born in Paris, he is the son of the late Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard), a renowned French philosopher, and grew up among the personalities and ideas of French intellectual circles. He first traveled to India in 1967.

He worked for a Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur. After completing his doctoral thesis in 1972, Ricard decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived in the Himalayas studying with the Kangyur Rinpoche and some other great masters of that tradition and became the close student and attendant of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche until his passing in 1991. Since then, Mr. Ricard has dedicated his activities to fulfilling Khyentse Rinpoche’s vision.

Ricard’s photographs of the spiritual masters, the landscape, and the people of the Himayalas have appeared in numerous books and magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson has said of his work, “Matthieu’s spiritual life and his camera are one, from which springs these images, fleeting and eternal.”

He is the author and photographer of Tibet, An Inner Journey and Monk Dancers of Tibet and, in collaboration, the photobooks Buddhist Himalayas, Journey to Enlightenment and recently Motionless Journey: From a Hermitage in the Himalayas. He is the translator of numerous Buddhist texts, including The Life of Shabkar. The dialogue with his father, Jean-Francois Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher, was a best seller in Europe and was translated into 21 languages, and The Quantum and the Lotus (coauthored with Trinh Xuan Thuan) reflects his long-standing interest in science and Buddhism. His new book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill was also a major best-seller in France.

A board member of the Mind and Life Institute, which is devoted to meetings and collaborative research between scientists and Buddhist scholars and meditators, his contributions have appeared in Destructive Emotions (edited by Daniel Goleman) and other books of essays. He is deeply engaged in the research on the effect of mind training on the brain, at Madison-Wisconsin, Princeton and Berkeley.

He received the French National Order of Merit for his humanitarian work in the East. For the last few years, Mr. Ricard has dedicated his effort and the royalites of his books to various charitable projects in Asia, that include building and maintaining clinics, schools and orphanages in the region. Since 1989, he has acted as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.