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Books

The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean-François Revel & Matthieu Ricard

Lachlan Dale explores some of the philosophical implications of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Monk and the Philosopher is an exploration of Tibetan Buddhist belief and practise, and an attempt to understand the religion’s growing popularity in the West. The book is in the form of a series of conversations between Jean-François Revel, a French intellectual known for his defense of liberalism and wariness of the totalitarian tendencies of religion, and his son Matthieu Ricard, who in the early 1970s abandoned a promising career in molecular genetics to study Tibetan Buddhism in Darjeeling. For Revel, his son’s decision to choose Eastern wisdom over the fruits of Western liberalism must have come as a shock. So on top of his desire to understand the appeal of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, Revel also wanted to better understand his son. Moreover, the disagreements between father and son roughly mirror the split between Eastern and Western forms of knowledge, making this book an excellent critique of Tibetan Buddhism for the philosophically-minded Westerner.

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