Honestly, Princess Caroline is the greatest, I really love her.
What a fascinating and unique person is French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard ,the "happiest person in the world"!!!!
How many people in the world even know who he is?
Born in
Aix-les-Bains,
Savoie,
France, he is the son of the late
Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard), a renowned French philosopher. His mother is the lyrical abstractionist painter Yahne Le Toumelin. Matthieu Ricard grew up among the personalities and ideas of French intellectual circles.
[1]
He worked for a Ph.D. degree in
molecular genetics at the
Pasteur Institute under French Nobel Laureate
François Jacob. 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 Rinpoche's death in 1991. Since then, Dr. 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
Himalayas 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
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 2003 book
Plaidoyer pour le bonheur (published in English in 2006 as
Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill)
[2] explores the meaning and fulfillment of happiness and was a major best-seller in France.
He has been dubbed the "happiest person in the world" by popular media.
[3][4][5] Matthieu Ricard was a volunteer subject in a study performed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's on happiness, scoring significantly beyond the average obtained after testing hundreds of volunteers.
[4]
He co-authored a study on the brains of long-term meditators, including himself, who had undergone a minimum of three years retreat.
[6]
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 engaged in 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[
vague]. For the last few years,[
when?] Dr. Ricard has dedicated his effort and the royalties 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.
[1]
Happy posting! 
maybe because she's grandmum now? ;-)
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