Richard Gere's Articles on Lion's Roar

A monk and a movie star: two very different lifestyles and so, you would think, two different paths to happiness. But actor Richard Gere and the French author and monastic Matthieu Ricard share a serious commitment to Buddhism, and they agree that real, lasting happiness is beyond conditions and circumstances. They held this lively, insightful conversation on the true nature of happiness at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. Richard Gere: Let’s start by talking about where you came from and what led you to where you are now. Matthieu Ricard: I was an ordinary guy, but I was fortunate to meet inspiring people from all walks of life. That gave me insight into what it is to be a good human being, and what doesn’t necessarily correlate with being a good human being. Since my father was a philosopher, the great Parisian intellectuals were often at our table, and since my mother was a painter, there were also many artists. I was learning to be both a scientist and a musician. At sixteen, I had lunch with Stravinsky. The man I worked under at the Pasteur Institute had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. What struck me, though, was that there was no real correlation between the quality of the human being and their particular genius. You could be a wonderful pianist and yet be an incredible pain to be with! [Audience laughs] You could be an extraordinary gardener and impossible with people. You could be a profound thinker and vicious to all your family. Or you might be very nice. There seemed to be no correlation between genius and the everyday quality of the human being. I would have loved to play chess like Bobby Fischer, but I would not want to be like Bobby Fisher. I got a new and important perspective on this phenomenon when I went to India in 1967, where I met a large number of remarkable beings. Richard Gere: What took you to the Himalayas for the first time? Matthieu Ricard: I saw a documentary called The Message of the Tibetans, made by a French filmmaker named Arnaud Desjardins, who had spent six months in the Himalayas, filming all the great Tibetan teachers who had fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet. At the end of it, there was ten minutes, in silence, showing face after face of those great beings. I was completely amazed by their quality. They all looked different—some with big noses, some smiling, some a little bit strict—but there was a singular quality of being. They displayed human qualities that I thought I might like to have, qualities quite different from the kind of genius I had been exposed to. That’s what inspired me to first go there. Then I did meet teachers in person. I found they had a strength that didn’t impose anything on you or put you down. It was an inspiring strength. They exuded tremendous kindness. Suddenly, I thought, if I could become something like that it would be a great thing to do with this life. Richard Gere: How long did it take before you made the decision to go there for good? Matthieu Ricard: I was at the Pasteur Institute, but my mind was always flying to Darjeeling, so I thought I’d better change the situation. When I finished my Ph.D., I decided to return to India and stay there. It was the right time; I had finished my work and published some scientific papers. Richard Gere: You’re being humble. You walked away from the beginning of what would have been an amazing career as a scientist. Matthieu Ricard: Yes, people ask me how I could have made such a radical break. I didn’t think of it that way. I just went where I thought life would be more fulfilling. There was a continuity between studying bacteria and studying the mind and the mechanism of happiness. I thought I was getting a good deal! [Everyone laughs] Richard Gere: Eventually, you ended up studying closely with and translating for His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Can you say a little about that? Matthieu Ricard: He was one of the most beloved teachers in the Tibetan world and a teacher to the Dalai Lama. He spent thirty years in retreat, not something we can all do. In the second part of his life, he put himself totally at the service of others. He would teach from morning to evening. He would teach thousands of people at a time, and even at lunch he would teach two or three people. He was so simple and also like a mountain, six feet five inches tall. I spent fifteen years with him and never witnessed any moment when he was harmful to others. He could be very strict with people, but never harmful. A guru is not someone who manipulates every instant of your life but someone who shows you what you could become. Richard Gere: Did you have any traumatic experiences as a child, a time of intense suffering, that would cause you to seek the way to happiness? Matthieu Ricard: Funny, a friend of mine told me, “You are the last person to write a book on happiness. You really didn’t ever suffer!” [Audience laughs] Richard Gere: That’s true. Matthieu Ricard: How do you know?! Richard Gere: I have suffered! I know about suffering! [Everyone laughs] So, Matthieu, what’s the big deal about happiness? I mean, really. Matthieu Ricard: Well, the word is admittedly vague. And the French intellectuals hate that. They say, We’re not interested in happiness. Even Goethe said that three days of unchanging happiness would be unbearable. [Audience laughs] Suffering is so nice; it’s changing all the time—all the colors and shapes, the intensity. But in fact, people mistake pleasurable feelings for genuine happiness. With pleasure, we jump on something, then we add something else, and something else, and then we collapse exhausted and depressed. People never think of happiness as a way of being because they are thinking of pleasure, which depends on circumstances. It’s conditioned. One ice cream is great; two is OK; three, you feel nauseated. That’s pleasure. Richard Gere: You talk in your new book, Happiness, about moments of real happiness, not ice-cream-cone happiness, but the moments we remember in our solitude—the moments of making a child smile, a deep sunset that takes us away from ourselves, a moment when the idea of “self” evaporates, when we witness the basic life force of another being, or even our own, without the filter of the mind feeding us negative, toxic inputs. Matthieu Ricard: This is our innate insight. We walk on the snow, under the stars, and wow, we feel good. There’s no inner conflict. When you make a gesture of pure generosity to a child, with no strings attached, asking for no praise or reward, you feel pure love. At times like this you ask yourself, naturally, if you could be like that all the time. But when you get angry, when you think you’re 100 percent right, the next day you probably regret it. So slowly, when you start distinguishing the states of mind that nurture a deep sense of well-being and those that emit mental toxins that destroy the well-being in yourself and others, you ask whether you can let go of the one and cultivate the other. Is that possible? If the powerful mental toxins are part of our deepest nature, perhaps in destroying them we would destroy ourselves. But if they are just like a painting on the surface, we can change them. So the real question is: are these afflictive emotions an intrinsic part of our mind or not? Richard Gere: During one of the seminars with the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life Institute, we discussed a moment when the mind can see an event purely, with no overlay of memory or projection or anything else. It is a very, very small moment, and then the brain kicks in and measures things against the known. It changes the experience so that it fits the categories of what it already has learned to function with, what it knows. Can you describe these layers of the mind and how their functions relate to the emotions and the heart? Matthieu Ricard: Usually when we experience an emotion like anger, we completely associate with this emotion. We are anger. Yet we keep on escaping and going to the target of our anger—the person who has been so nasty to us. Then we feel upset by the anger. Whenever we see that person or remember them, it triggers anger. There’s no end. Instead of looking at the target, you could disassociate your mind from the anger. You could look at anger as you would look at a fire or a volcano. You could really look at it, observe it as a phenomenon, identify with it. If you do that, you cut it off from its fuel, the target. Then, slowly, the anger is bound to disappear like, as is said, “the morning frost under the rising sun.” We are not repressing anger somewhere, like a time bomb. We are not ignoring it. We are not letting it explode. We are dealing with it in a way that disarms it. There’s a beautiful image in the Buddhist teachings: our mind is like the surface of a mirror. The quality of a mirror is to reflect all kinds of images—angry faces, smiling faces, sad faces, bland faces—but they don’t penetrate the mirror. They don’t belong to the mirror. If they did, they would obstruct every other image. An angry face would stay there, and the smiling face could never emerge. Similarly, there is pure awareness, pure consciousness, from which all kinds of thoughts arise. If that is the case, then the afflictive emotions are simply tied to causes and conditions. By training the mind, using the right antidotes, replacing hatred with loving-kindness or greed with inner freedom, you could change your mental landscape. That’s meditation. Meditation is a very exotic word, but in fact, it simply means to become familiar with a way of being, to cultivate inner qualities. Richard Gere: In fact, everyone is meditating anyhow, meaning that we habituate ourselves to mind states. Most of us are habituated to egocentricity, self-cherishing, to anger and hatred. We meditate on blood, essentially. We have to find a radical new way to meditate on higher qualities of love and compassion, forgiveness, altruism, cherishing the other instead of the self. Perhaps we ought to...

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