Customer Reviews
Excellent! - By: , 14 Apr 1999 
Special thanks to father & son for sharing this dialogue!
An exceptional Buddhist-Humanist dialogue - By: , 08 Apr 1999 Utterly absorbing, inspiring, & arcane, this remarkable dialogue engages East with West, ideas with life, & science with the humanities, providing' wisdom on how to enrich the way we live our lives. The undercurrents andsubtle tensions makes this one of the most thoughtful & humane exchanges on the East versus West front. Recommended as a possible classic & milestonein the Buddhist conversion of Western science & philosophy.
Atheist, humanist father and Buddhist monk son hold a dialog - By: , 22 Feb 1999 Western scientists & philosophically minded intellectuals often have contempt for religion, & some think it is a justified contempt that religious leaders have brought upon themselves by not living up to their principles - & by being ignorant of science, insisting upon theological premises & conclusions that no"philosopher" could accept.
So a culture at cross-purposes has been built upin the West. At times it has led to spiritual heartsickness & anxiety, the abandonment of hope that life has meaning. What people are left with on the whole is nihilism, the view that nothing exists except phenomena apparent to the senses, & that consciousness is an accidental product of matter, that one's mind does not survive death. Given the barren desertin which the spirit has to dwell, it seems courageous rather than merely materialistic that people just get on with trying to improve their standard of living, & it adds poignancy to the fascination with money & sex & celebrity, the recourse to entertainments & the love of sports.
This book, The Monk & the Philosopher, provides an antidote to the conflict between Western science & philosophy & traditional religion. It illustrates the highest possible vantage point from which to see meaning directly & simply, that is, a principial metaphysical tradition of wisdom,in this case, Buddhism.
The Monk & the Philosopher is a dialogue between a father who is an authority on Western philosophy (one of his books is entitled, From Thales to Kant) & a son whoin his twenties took a doctoratein molecular biology at the Institut Pasteur & later became a monkin the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition.
From the very first exchange between father & son the book provides a surprising jolt of energy & clarity to the reader. Unnecessary things weighing on the mind fall away & one is welcomed into an invigorating world of essentials. The company of these two first rate minds, narrating the experiences of life that led them to the conclusions they hold - atheist humanism versus the view on the path toward Buddhist enlightenment, raises one's own capacity for "the examined life" that Socrates considered the only kind "worth living," & makes one feel the thrill of the mind working as a powerful instrument capable of cutting through sloth, avoidance & fuzziness to arrive at the threshold of a new awareness. (Like Keats, "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken").
These are conversational exchanges, challenging & harmonious, between a western philosophically & scientifically minded father & a son who has come out the other side of the scientific investigation of truth as residing exclusivelyin the deciphering of matter & has lived for thirty years with Tibetan Lamas, monks, nuns & lay people as an outstanding exponent of the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition. They are fascinating, civilized, candid, wise, funny, deeply tragic about Tibet, serene, & full of loving-kindness. The Frenchness of the two men is perhaps what contributes the "clear ideas", the capacity to express ideas with logical rigor at the same time as one is charming & entertaining one's interlocutor with the elegance & ease of one who knows the world & is able to maintain a healthy detachment from any sort of fanatical insistence upon one's standpoint. It is a family dialogue between a savant & a sage.
Certainly the deep compassion that radiates through the dialogue comes from the effect on both men, to one degree & another, of their privileged encounter with Tibetan Buddhist communities. Therein the experience of the worst that man can inflict upon his neighbor has been met with wisdom & compassion, so that the Tibetans are qualified to be the teachers of a western philosopher & a molecular biologist. What is profoundly admirable about these two brilliant companionsin the search for truth is that they are eminently capable of learning from the wisdom & compassion of their Tibetan Buddhist friends.
