Verwandte Artikel zu The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss...

The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life - Hardcover

Revel, Jean Francois; Ricard, Matthieu

 
9780805241624: The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0805241620 ISBN 13: 9780805241624
Verlag: Schocken, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Jean Francois-Revel, a pillar of French intellectual life in our time, became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. Twenty-seven years ago, his son, Matthieu Ricard, gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism -- not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters.

Meeting in an inn overlooking Katmandu, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored the questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history. Does life have meaning? What is consciousness? Is man free? What is the value of scientific and material progress? Why is there suffering, war, and hatred? Their conversation is not merely abstract: they ask each other questions about ethics, rights, and responsibilities, about knowledge and belief, and they discuss frankly the differences in the way each has tried to make sense of his life.

Utterly absorbing, inspiring, and accessible, this remarkable dialogue engages East with West, ideas with life, and science with the humanities, providing wisdom on how to enrich the way we live our lives.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jean-Francois Revel, a member of the Academie Francaise, was born in 1924. He studied and taught philosophy but abandoned university teaching to concentrate on writing. He was editor for many years of the influential political weekly L'Express. His books, including the best-seller Without Marx or Jesus and How Democracies Perish, have gained worldwide recognition.

Matthieu Ricard lives in the Shechen Monastery in Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received his doctorate in molecular biology from the Institut Pasteur in Paris. In 1972 he decided to forsake his scientific career to better concentrate on his Buddhist studies, which he had begun years earlier. He has published Journey to Enlightenment, a book of photographs about his teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (one of the most eminent Tibetan masters of our times and a teacher to The Dalai Lama), as well as translations of many Buddhist texts. He often accompanies The Dalai Lama to France as his personal interpreter.

Aus dem Klappentext

s-Revel, a pillar of French intellectual life in our time, became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. Twenty-seven years ago, his son, Matthieu Ricard, gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism -- not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters.

Meeting in an inn overlooking Katmandu, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored the questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history. Does life have meaning? What is consciousness? Is man free? What is the value of scientific and material progress? Why is there suffering, war, and hatred? Their conversation is not merely abstract: they ask each other questions about ethics, rights, and responsibilities, about knowledge and belief, and they discuss frankly the differences in the way each has tried to make sense of his life.

Utterly absorbing, inspiring, and accessible, this remarkable dialogu

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Jean Francois-- So let's come back to the question, is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion? Or philosophy and religion? What strikes me is this. Buddhism, on the whole, has a very positive image in the West. It's true that right now people's feelings toward Buddhism are reinforced by the sympathy they feel toward the Tibetans, with all the sufferings they are going through, and also by the impact the Dalai Lama's personality has had worldwide and the affection--and even veneration--that he arouses everywhere, even in parts of the world unfamiliar with Buddhism. But quite apart from that recent political limelight, Buddhism has been treated with considerable respect in the West for a long time. It's always been seen as a rather unadulterated and straightforward doctrine that can therefore be accepted by a critical mind. It fits with Western rationalism, to which it adds a moral and spiritual dimension--a dimension of wisdom, or even more, not incompatible with criteria that have been evolving in the West with the modern scientific outlook since the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalism. But when you come to Asia, that ethereal vision of Buddhism is put to the severest of tests. Someone like me is struck, or perhaps I should say shocked, by many aspects of the way Buddhism is practiced that I can only qualify as superstitious. Prayer flags, prayer wheels, belief in reincarnation -- like that three-year old we met the other day who's supposed to be a reincarnated lama.

Matthiew-- Yes, the whole idea of reincarnation, especially, is something we'll need to talk about to clarify. But first, let's go through your points in order. I think the main reason Buddhism has been seen in the West as so intellectually acceptable is that it tackles the basic concerns of any living being. The core teachings of Buddhism are not at all exotic, nor are they influenced by cultural factors of the sort that caused you such surprise. They simply analyze and dismantle the mechanisms of happiness and suffering. Where does suffering come from? What are its causes? How can it be remedied? Gradually, through investigation and contemplation, Buddhism gets down to the deep causes of suffering. It's a search that concerns any human being, Buddhist or not.

J.F.-- Can you define what you call suffering?

M.-- A state of deep dissatisfaction, which may be combined with physical pain but is first and foremost a mental experience. As everyone knows, different people can perceive the same things in completely opposite ways, either as pleasant or as unpleasant. Suffering arises when the self, the 'me' that we cherish and protect, is threatened, or doesn't get what it wants. The most intense physical sufferings can be experienced in very different ways according to our state of mind. Moreover, ordinary goals in life, like power, possessions, the pleasures of the senses and fame, can procure temporary satisfaction but are never permanently satisfying. One day or another, they're bound to turn into sources of unhappiness. They can never bring lasting fulfillment, or an inner peace untouched by outer circumstances. Pursuing such worldly goals all our lives, we have no more chance of attaining true happiness than a fisherman has of catching fish by throwing his nets into a dry riverbed.

J.F.-- The Epicureans and the Stoics both said the same thing, in exactly the same terms.

M.-- That state of dissatisfaction is characteristic of the conditioned world, which, by its very nature, can only bring ephemeral satisfactions. In Buddhist terms, you'd say that the world or 'circle' of rebirths, samsara, is pervaded by suffering. But this isn't at all a pessimistic way of looking at the world, it's simply an observation. The next step is to look for remedies to that suffering, and for that you need to know what causes it. At the initial level of investigation, Buddhism concludes that suffering is born from desire, attachment, hatred, pride, jealousy, lack of discernment, and all the states of mind that are designated as 'negative' or 'obscuring' because they stir the mind up and plunge it into a state of confusion and insecurity. These negative emotions, in turn, arise from the notion of a self, a 'me' that we cherish and want to protect at all costs. Attachment to the self is a fact, but the self that is the object of that attachment has no true existence; it exists nowhere and in no way as an autonomous and permanent entity. It exists neither in the different physical and mental parts that constitute an individual, nor somewhere outside them, nor in their combination.

If you object that the self corresponds to the meeting of those parts, that amounts to conceding that it's just a simple label that the intellect imposes on the temporary meeting of various interdependent elements. In fact, the self doesn't exist in any of those elements, and when they separate the very notion of it disappears. Not to unmask the imposture of the self is ignorance, the momentary inability to recognize the true nature of things. It's that ignorance, therefore, that is the ultimate cause of suffering. Once we manage to get rid of our erroneous understanding of the self and our belief in the true and solid existence of phenomena, once we recognize that this 'I' doesn't really exist, there's no more reason to be afraid of not getting what we want or being subjected to what we don't want.

J.F.-- That part of the analysis is common to Buddhism and to numerous Western philosophies--to the wisdom of classical times, let's say. In France, it crops up again in Montaigne and then in Pascal, along with an intended apology for Christianity.

M.-- It could be because of that initial simplicity of basic Buddhism that the Western world feels an affinity for its teaching and can easily get into it straight away.

J.F.-- I myself feel that what's attracted certain Western philosophers in Buddhism is the idea of being able to attain a kind of serenity. I don't want to use the word 'apathy', because of its negative sense. It's more a question of what some psychological schools called 'ataraxia', to use a rather pedantic word. Ataraxia is an imperturbable state that the wise man has to attain, according to Stoicism; it's to no longer be exposed to the unpredictable effects of the good and bad that come up in daily life.

M.-- It's very important not to confuse serenity and apathy. One of the characteristics of a stable spiritual practice is not to be vulnerable to outer circumstances, whether favorable or unfavorable. The practitioner's mind is likened to a mountain that the winds can't shake; he's neither tormented by the difficulties he may come across nor elated by his successes. But that inner equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference. It's accompanied by inner jubilation, and by an openness of mind expressed as unfailing altruism.

J.F.-- That's the element common to all traditions of wisdom. You could easily be describing the Stoic sage. Nowadays, in our scientific age, philosophers have abandoned the ideal of wisdom, in which the philosopher would provide his readers or listeners with recipes to help them attain such wisdom. So it's perhaps not surprising that Buddhism has acquired a certain authority in the West these days. But the attraction of Buddhism seems to go a bit beyond this treasure shared by all wisdoms, to a fusion of the self in some sort of undetermined state.

M.-- It's not at all a matter of a fusion or extinction of the self in some amorphous, undetermined state, but of lucidly recognizing that the self has no true existence and that it's the source of all your problems. Here, Buddhism offers a very abundant range of methods by which to attain the inner peace that flows from letting go of that belief in a self. It doesn't stop at just describing all the states that arise in the mind, but shows how to transform them, to...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Schocken
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0805241620
ISBN 13 
9780805241624
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Schocken
https://agu.com/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
New York
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar