Matthieu Ricard: Monk, Former Scientist and Author

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

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Matthieu Ricard (born 1946) is a French Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition who lives at Shechen Monastery in Nepal. Trained as a molecular biologist, he left science in 1972 for the Himalayas. He is a translator, the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989, a photographer, the author of The Monk and the Philosopher and Happiness, and founder of Karuna-Shechen. The press calls him “the happiest man in the world”; he says the label has no scientific basis.

From the Pasteur laboratory to Darjeeling

He was born in France on 15 February 1946, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the son of the philosopher Jean-François Revel (1924–2006), who was born Jean-François Ricard, and the painter Yahne Le Toumelin (1923–2023). His own site gives only “born in France in 1946”; we found no approved source for the birthplace that circulates online.

The turn in his life came early. On a first journey to India in 1967, at twenty-one, he met Tibetan masters in Darjeeling, among them Kangyur Rinpoche. He told The Guardian in 2023 that he was “born on 12 June 1967”, the day he met that first teacher.

He went back to finish his science. His thesis, Contribution à l’étude de la division cellulaire chez E. coli K12, a study of cell division in the bacterium E. coli, is catalogued as a doctorate in natural sciences from the Université Paris 7 in 1972, directed by François Jacob. The research was done in Jacob’s laboratory at the Institut Pasteur, and the Mind & Life Institute describes the degree as earned “at the Institut Pasteur”. Ricard himself calls it a Ph.D. “in cell genetics”. A 2012 paper he co-authored calls it a Ph.D. in biochemistry. All of these describe the same 1972 degree. Before it he had also written a book on animal migration, Les Migrations animales (Robert Laffont, 1968).

In 1972 he gave up research and moved to the Himalayas. He became a monk in the late 1970s. The BnF record says “Moine bouddhiste (depuis 1978)”, and The Guardian’s account of him becoming a monk “six years later” also gives 1978. The 2012 paper gives 1979. We give both years because the sources do not agree.

His teachers and Shechen Monastery

Ricard’s French biography names two principal teachers: Kangyur Rinpoche, whose dates his site gives as 1897–1975, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1991). Shechen’s own site says its emphasis is “on the Nyingma lineage of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche”. Nyingma is one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism; see Tibetan Buddhism for the wider tradition and Vajrayana for its tantric path.

According to the description of The Spirit of Tibet, his book about Khyentse Rinpoche, on his own site, Ricard was the master’s personal assistant for the last fourteen years of his life. The two travelled together through Tibet, Bhutan, India and Nepal. After Khyentse Rinpoche’s death in 1991, his grandson Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche, abbot of Shechen Monastery, asked Ricard to become “more actively involved in serving the local communities”. That request led to Karuna-Shechen. Ricard lives at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal.

Anyone looking for him among Buddhist teachers should know one thing. He has been a monk since the late 1970s, but his own site says plainly: “Matthieu Ricard does not consider himself as a teacher.” He declines requests for teachings and refers people to his books. By his own description, then, he is a monk, not a lama in the sense of a teacher who takes students.

Interpreter, translator and photographer

He has been the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama since 1989. From Tibetan he has translated, among other works, The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones, and The Heart of Compassion, a book of teachings by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

He is also a working photographer of the Himalayan region. His photography books include Bhutan: Ode to Beauty, The Land of Serenity, Motionless Journey: From a Hermitage in the Himalayas and Tibet: An Inner Journey. TED lists two talks by him: “The habits of happiness”, posted November 2007, and “How to let altruism be your guide”, posted January 2015.

Matthieu Ricard’s books

The French editions below are from the BnF catalogue and the English editions from library catalogue records. Each French edition appeared before the English one, but not every French edition is the original: the BnF catalogues Cerveau et méditation, his dialogue with the neuroscientist Wolf Singer, as translated from English.

The Guardian’s 2023 profile calls The Monk and the Philosopher, the 1997 dialogue with his father, the book that “completely changed the trajectory of his life”. The Quantum and the Lotus is a dialogue between Ricard and the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan on Buddhist ideas and modern physics; for how far such parallels hold, see Buddhism and science.

Of Happiness he said, “I wanted to call it Suffering.” He separates happiness from pleasure: pleasure is “perfectly fine, but not happiness”, because it fades when circumstances change. The early Buddhist texts draw a similar line between sense-pleasure and a steadier wellbeing; Buddhism and happiness sets out that distinction, and A Plea for the Animals connects with Buddhism and animals.

The meditation research: co-author and subject

Ricard is a Founding Steward of the Mind & Life Institute, which brings contemplatives and scientists together, and previously served on its board. His own site says he contributes to meditation research at universities in the United States and Europe and has co-authored several scientific papers. He has been both a co-author of this research and, in at least one study, its subject. Three of those studies show what that work did and did not find.

PNAS, 2004. He is the fourth of five authors of “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice” (Lutz, Greischar, Rawlings, Ricard and Davidson), listed with Shechen Monastery. The paper does not name any of its eight practitioners, so it cannot show that any result came from his brain. Its design and its own caveats are set out on our Mingyur Rinpoche page. The point that matters here is that the paper measured EEG gamma activity during compassion meditation, not happiness, and says that “the functional consequences of sustained gamma-activity during mental practice are not currently known”.

Emotion, 2012. In “Meditation and the startle response: a case study”, Robert Levenson, Paul Ekman and Ricard tested a single participant, “MR (one of the authors on this paper)”. The stimulus was a sudden, loud burst of white noise. Compared with a distraction task, open-presence meditation reduced his responses on every physiological measure and in facial expression, and focused meditation on every measure except finger pulse amplitude; open presence produced the smaller responses of the two, though not in skin conductance. When the noise came without warning, the paper reports that “the autonomic and gross motor aspects of his startle response fell within normal bounds”; his facial response used the usual pattern of muscles but was “much smaller in intensity”, judged against the authors’ past experience of men his age rather than the control group, and the authors say they do not know why. They are clear about the limit: “as with any single-case study, we cannot know the extent to which the findings will generalize to other meditators.”

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2014. With Olga Klimecki, Susanne Leiberg and Tania Singer, Ricard helped design a training study in which participants practised empathy first and then compassion. Empathy training increased the negative feelings people reported when they watched videos of suffering. Compassion training reversed that and increased the positive feelings they reported. The completers were 25 women in the training group and 28 in a memory-training control group, and the authors note that, because only women took part, “future studies are needed”. Ricard’s own summary is that this line of work showed clearly the difference between empathy and compassion. The paper describes its method as “a contemplative technique from secular compassion training programs”; for compassion as the Buddhist texts describe it, see karuna.

For what meditation research in general has and has not established, see Buddhism and science.

”The happiest man in the world”: a label, not a finding

TED’s speaker page still introduces him as “Sometimes called the ‘happiest man in the world’” and quotes Robert Chalmers of The Independent: Ricard “has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world.” The description of Happiness on his own site says he has been “described by scientists as ‘the happiest man alive’”.

Ricard has disowned the label for more than a decade. In a blog post of 5 April 2013 he traced it to a commentator in a documentary on happiness by the Australian broadcaster ABC, and then to a cover story in The Independent. The claim, he wrote, “is not at all based on scientific findings”. “This is really a joke,” he wrote in a companion post the same day. He explained that experienced meditators doing compassion meditation had shown unusually high activity in brain areas linked to positive emotion, and that he “happened to be one of the first to participate”. He gives the number of meditators differently in the two posts, so we give none.

He had not changed his mind by 2023. He told The Guardian it was “a nonsense idea”, and asked: “How can we know the state of happiness of 8 billion human beings?” Asked whether the label annoyed him, he said: “No. I feel embarrassed.” On his grave he would rather have “Become a better human being to better serve others.”

The phrase still appears on pages about him, his own site included, and he has said why he no longer fights it. In 2013 he wrote that he had tried to disclaim it “in vain”, and that he now tries to take the story “with philosophy and amusement”. He told The Guardian that his spiritual teacher’s grandson had advised him: “Take it and use it. Stop fighting it.”

The same Guardian article says the label stuck after a 2004 project “that analysed his brain”, and that the gamma waves recorded were “associated with wellbeing and focus”. That is the newspaper’s summary. The 2004 paper names none of its subjects and says the functional meaning of the gamma activity is unknown. Earlier press stories went further. On 1 November 2012 Smithsonian magazine’s website reported that researchers had found “excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart”, and that this pointed, in the article’s words, to “an abnormally large capacity for happiness”. The article names no paper, and none of the three papers above reports a prefrontal measurement for Ricard by name.

None of those three studies measured Ricard’s happiness, still less compared it with anyone else’s. The 2014 study asked women to rate their feelings while watching short videos, which is not a measure of a person’s happiness. The same superlative has also been attached to Mingyur Rinpoche, and it is no better supported there. This is a media trope, not a scientific result, and Ricard has said so himself.

Karuna-Shechen

His site says that “all proceeds” from his books, photographs and events go to Karuna-Shechen, the humanitarian organisation he founded. The organisation describes itself as secular. It works with marginalised communities whatever their religion, with projects in India, Nepal and Tibet, and reports total spending of US$4.2 million in 2025.

The two accounts of its founding differ, and both come from inside. The organisation says it was founded in 2000. In a 2025 blog post Ricard tells a longer story: after Rabjam Rinpoche’s request, a mobile clinic service in Bihar, India, in 1999; then a clinic in Nepal; then a school and a small clinic near the Shechen monastery in Kham, eastern Tibet, completed in 2000. “In 2004,” he writes, “as our projects in Asia had grown in scope, we officially founded Karuna-Shechen in France.” He also writes that after the two 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, a team of about thirty monks from the Shechen Clinic distributed aid for two months and “helped 200,000 people in 220 villages”. These are his own figures. The organisation says Ricard founded it “inspired by the universal values of Buddhism”, and it serves people of any faith. For the wider movement of Buddhist-inspired social action, see engaged Buddhism.

On mindfulness, in his own words

He has spoken about how mindfulness is marketed. He told The Guardian that people now present it “like a panacea” and that “it’s a bit like McMindfulness”. Of its pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn he said: “He never pretended this is full-fledged Buddhism. If a tool is useful, it is useful.” That debate is set out on our secular mindfulness page.