Choose happiness.

My first night in Kathmandu I was startled from a dead man’s sleep by the ringing of my phone. I fumbled for it, girding myself for the worst. It was my youngest son, back home in the States. “Hi, Dad,” he said cheerily. He’d found a pile of antique smartphones (circa the late aughts) in a closet, and he wanted to know if he and a friend could drop them from his bedroom window, in order to “explode them” on our driveway. It was important, he said. He also admitted sheepishly to having already taken a hammer to at least one. He’d forgotten that I was ten time zones away. I could hear more hammering in the background.

In my haze, I tried to formulate any good reason why not to destroy all of our mothballed phones. (I couldn’t even remember if they worked, or why we still had them in the first place.) I could hear myself, trying to parent. But he was so wide awake, and I was so dopey with fatigue.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea,” I said.

“Okay… What?”

“Thanks, we’ll be careful.”

I didn’t have any fight in me, fell back on my pillow, drooling. I could picture iPhones tumbling ass-over-teakettle from great heights, screens smashing, innards of chip and power board scattering. I daresay my annoyance faded, imagining my son doing violence to technology, freeing himself of all of that digital anxiety, the FOMO-spasms of unhappiness. I hoped that one day he might look back and think that this was the moment the revolution began. After all, if the studies are to be believed, the more digitally connected we are, the more isolation and doom we seem to feel.

What I admired most in my son was his unconscious desire to smash one of the gods of our addiction. If anything, I’d come over 7,000 miles in part to kill my phone, too. And to defrag my mind. Not just from the neon bombardment of our consumer­­ism but in full awareness that we’ve entered a new era of seeming no return: of random shootings, nasty politics, and daily tragedy. Was it even possible to find the gate back to some simpler Garden? So my pilgrimage possessed its own slightly cockamamy aspiration: I was wondering if, in this modern world of ours, one might have the audacity to start a contagion by pursuing a FOMO-less state of retro bliss, to cure our ills by visiting a monk on his mountaintop in Nepal, in search of the keys to ultimate happiness.

In Nepal, then, happiness first manifested itself as a Kathmandu taxi driver. Bumping over the dirt-packed byways of Boudha to the monastery, he kept yelling his hellos out the open window of his tiny Maruti Suzuki. Traveling at the speed of turtle, we passed a makeshift tent village—made of material left behind by the U.N.—people still homeless from the 2015 earthquake, and he kept jabbering, bursting out in laughter at friends on the streets. We hit a pothole, and my head smacked the ceiling. He was smiling in the rearview, not at my injury. Just because he couldn’t stop smiling.

The whole thing seemed like a film in which the protagonist emerges from a land of slate and snow, after a long hibernal slumber, to a world of bright colors and fluttering prayer flags. But it wasn’t all wonder: Through the window, too, appeared piles of rubble and scaffolded buildings, other structures cracked and abandoned. A haze of air pollution—mostly dust—settled thickly in the valley, bad enough that people wore surgical masks or bandannas over their mouths. Some of the buildings looked newly built, in a ramshackle way.

As it turned out, the monk I was searching for wasn’t just any monk. His name was Matthieu Ricard. A few weeks earlier, I’d been half-listening to NPR in my kitchen, letting the news of the day wash over me—all bullets and belittlements—and perked up at the words happiest man in the world. I didn’t catch his name that first time. But how could you not Google that? How could you not wonder what he’d found in our modern onslaught to be so damn happy about?

The Happy One—this Matthieu—had written a bushel of books, including one called, um, Happiness. I ordered it. Read it. There was nothing softheaded or self-helpy about it. Read it again. His picture appeared on the back flap, a bald man, trying despite himself to look a little serious. But the flicker in his eyes and curve of his mouth were saying, Nope, can’t do it. He couldn’t control his own bemusement.

“Happiness is a skill,” he wrote. “Skills must be learned.” Born to a famous French intellectual father—in a home where the likes of Igor Stravinsky and Luis Buñuel came and went—Matthieu had turned his back on both the life of a bon vivant Parisian and a career as a cellular geneticist at the Pasteur Institute, and disappeared into the monasteries and mountains of northern India in 1972, at the age of 26, to study at the feet of the great Buddhist masters who’d fled Tibet. (His last great teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, had lived in caves, on and off, for 30 years and stood 6’7″ tall.) Now, at 70, Matthieu was an international star, asked to do 350 events a year and countless interviews (way more than he had the hours for). He crisscrossed the globe, hobnobbed with the Dalai Lama. The demands on his time were ridiculous, and increasingly kept him from important monk-y things: like meditating and kindnessing and combating all bad global karma with good karma, superhero-monk-style. He said he’d written Happiness as a response to the question of a man who’d risen from the crowd at an event in Hong Kong and asked: “Can you give me one reason why I should go on living?”

Stark as that question was, these past months had raised a bevy of stark questions about our own humanity. In Paris and Orlando, Nice and Istanbul, the center could not hold. We’d been tossed headlong into a new maelstrom of violence, both physical and verbal. I wanted to know: How could happiness flourish in a sucky world? And how could we find it again?

On a whim, I’d sent Matthieu an e-mail, and to my surprise I heard right back. He, too, felt we’d reached a critical moment, and that it was important to revisit another question he’d posed in his book: “Are we supposed to come to terms with unhappiness rather than make a genuine and intelligent attempt to untangle happiness from suffering?”

Happiness was “a flourishing,” he said, a luminous sort of well-being known in Sanskrit as sukha. It resided, right there, within us. But we had to find a way to free and nurture it. To quit our grasping. This sukha, if metabolized, was all-powerful. With it, the Buddhists believed, walls could fall, life itself might be re-sanctified.

Perhaps it sounded silly and impossible—perhaps not—but when he answered my e-mail*, yes, come,* I was on a plane before he could take the invitation back.

When we arrived at the Shechen monastery, I looked for a man named Sanjeev, for he was the one who was going to give me a lift, to reach the Happy One on his mountain. Sanjeev, who wasn’t a monk, was in charge of a vast humanitarian operation, called Karuna-Shechen, that Matthieu had partially helped to build, with programs in place to combat human trafficking and to aid with ongoing earthquake relief, well over a year past the calamity. When I found him in his office, Sanjeev offered me a seat on the couch, as well as masala tea and cookies before our departure.

“In all of us is the design of the world,” he said. It felt like the beginning of a primer, or the part of a visit to the doctor where they take your blood pressure before you meet the physician. “We have the ability to access and understand the universe. To become other forms.” Then he pointed to my cup. “It’s tea you drink now,” he said. “In six hours it becomes you.” He acknowledged that, for some, it sounded crazy. “You may have Genghis Khan’s molecules in you,” he said.

Between sips and nibbles, Sanjeev kept on talking. Everything from his mouth felt like a bumper sticker on an old Volvo in Taos, pat and profound at once. And I kept nodding my head yes, leaving me to wonder if the weight of the spoken word is based on the weight of what you most need to hear.

“We think we can control the world, but it’s 99 percent chaos,” he said. “We can only change our minds about it.”

“We’re trying to get from point A to point B,” he said. “We bought a car to get there, but we’re so focused on the car, we forgot where point B is.”

“One must understand ‘the think’ behind ‘the thought,’ ” he said.

Yes, the chaos, the car, the think behind the thought. That last one seemed most pertinent. In this mean political season, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of think behind any thought. Which is weird for a country founded on documents that, at least in their conception, tried to allow for nuance, and gave ultimate priority to freedom and happiness. In fact, when the U.N. released its World Happiness Report 2016 earlier this year, the United States had slipped; we were now in 13th place among happiest countries, as measured when citizens were asked to consider the relative importance of six influencers of their happiness—GDP, life expectancy, social support, freedom, generosity, and trust in institutions. (Uzbekistan, ladies and gentlemen, ranked first in valuing freedom; Rwanda, trust; and Myanmar, generosity.)

“We have two ears and one mouth,” said Sanjeev, as if reading my mind about the shouting place I called home, “which means ideally we should hear more than we talk.”

And then we were on the road, mashed together in an old Land Rover, switchbacking along potholed roads. Everything smelled of altitude and things burning, a slight thickness to the air. Meanwhile, my monkey mind was in full tantrum. The sky had turned ominous, thunder sounding, a dark muddle of clouds now encroaching. I’d forgotten a rain jacket. And what were we going to eat, anyway? What if there were squat toilets? Within five minutes, I’d revolved into such a state that I figured I would starve or freeze, and shit myself on top of it. These were the ridiculous gyrations of my mind.

It was wet and chilly by the time we finally made it to the mountain. The grounds were lush and wooded, divvied into steppes and habitations. From here, on a clear day, you could see the Himalayas (Annapurna, Everest, the Ganesh Himal), but now a gray-purple murk clung to everything. We were greeted by a monk in a red puffer jacket, who led us up the slope to what would be my temporary lodging, a little rustic hut, as well stocked as a hotel suite (juices and fruit in the fridge, endless tea and cookies, my own bathroom and bedroom). We drank tea—Sanjeev, another practitioner, myself—waiting for Matthieu.

My first glimpse of him was more of a shape moving along the portico, on the other side of the vines. Or I heard him first, talking in a friendly hush. I realized he was chatting with a stray dog who was circling him, and they were playing. Or Matthieu wanted to play; the dog, who otherwise appeared to have been kicked around by life, wasn’t as willing. When Matthieu appeared in full view at last, he was smiling broadly, bare-shouldered in his saffron robes. He seemed unconcerned by the wet chill, his next meal, the squat toilets…unconcerned with Armageddon and all the rest of it. He greeted everyone, in roundnesses. His eyes were round, his shaved head was round, his body was round. I’d soon find there was a roundness to his idea as well, a fertility, a watermelon-ness: juices and pit, flesh and skin. He assiduously eschewed the New Age-isms of Buddhism. No bumper stickers here.

“Ah, you’ve made it,” he said to me. “I’m so embarrassed.”

He was embarrassed? Embarrassed that I’d come 7,000 miles, to see him. Shouldn’t I have been embarrassed? Wasn’t my desperation palpable? I’d left kith and kin behind to be here. But here we were, and first, he wanted to warn me that there were tigers and leopards with us on the mountain, too. The leopards in particular made a scary, abrasive sound, which was nerve-racking. “I have to be very careful,” he said, winking with both eyes. “Maybe they like goats, and French monks smell a little like goats. So what to do?” Matthieu spoke with an accent that took a moment to get used to. He said this area was also a hot spot for mouses, “big mouses.” Tigers, leopards, and…Big Mouses. That seemed particularly terrifying. One of the Big Mouses, “the Commander,” Matthieu called him, lived nearby, and could be seen huddled on the mountaintop from time to time. There’d been a secret meeting with the Chinese, at that monastery on the hill over there. I was trying to imagine that Big Mouse, so twitchy and whiskered they called him the Commander, “meeting with the Chinese,” when it occurred to me:

Maoist. Not mouse.

A decade earlier, this region had been filled with uprising and machine-gun fire, Matthieu told me. “It was quite scary,” he said. “But not as scary as the tigers and leopards. I must tell you, when you hear the animals out walking at night, you go, like, Eeeeeeeeee.” Matthieu seemed to see it on my face: a flicker of worry.

He had written a book called A Plea for the Animals, about vegetarianism, about “the 50 billion land animals and 2 trillion sea animals” killed each year, that’s being published in the U.S. this month. “It’s not the right time to be eaten by a tiger,” he said, scrunching his face, to laughter from the rest of us. “Bad publicity for the book. This is a place of compassion, and everyone’s going to say that tigers don’t reciprocate.”

This monk guy was funny, too. The man-crush was instant. I kept hearing the words he’d written: “The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world…. It is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind.”

So began the novitiate’s lesson.

When you meet a monk on his mountaintop, it’s like taking a drug called Tonsured Tangerine Euphoria or Rainbow Saffron Dreams. When you see the world through his eyes, everything turns lovely colors, and you suddenly find yourself un-encrusted—free of your baggage—suddenly loving everyone and everything. It’s a self-manufactured rave in your head. Talking to Matthieu, who spoke in fast- forward and was always on the verge of laughter, was like plugging into a different hard drive, one packed with eons of Tibetan wisdom mixed with ions of scientific inquiry. He spoke repeatedly about the keys to happiness: compassion and altruism and…brain plasticity.

This is where Matthieu, the scientist, sought to tie down the abstractions of Buddhism for a modern world steeped in big data. In this, he had become a kind of bridge between the East and the West, religion and science, optimism and secular cynicism. What made Matthieu’s message more palatable was that he hadn’t emerged from a Tibetan cave at all. He wasn’t disconnected from our modern world. Yes, he was a monk, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love to ski, or that he wasn’t a great photographer, or that, back in his early years, he hadn’t threatened to build a harpsichord, then penned a book entitled The Mystery of Animal Migration. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t occasionally drop the F-bomb. In conversation, he referred to Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, quoted the latest study from the London School of Economics, fretted over guns in America and global warming while citing the work of Gus Speth, dissed Ayn Rand and Freud, and referenced Kafka (“War is a monstrous failure of imagination”), Kant, and the psychologist Paul Ekman while sprinkling in some of the Tibetan masters as well. He told me, “If Donald Trump were more of a rainbow, we’d all be in less trouble.” And then said he disapproved of “self-help.” “It’s a narcissistic game,” he said. For him, it all boiled down to one question: How am I supposed to live my life?

We took carved steps, rising higher above my hut, passing several habitations, modest abodes like mine, following a line of prayer flags until we came over the lip of the mountain where a breeze was moving the needles of the larches. Matthieu said that sometimes he could hear the monks laughing down below at dinnertime, when they joined one another to eat. There were about a dozen of them, in a cordoned-off area, observing retreats that could last up to seven years.

Now we came upon the hermitage of Dagpo, a chunky monk with a Yoda-like voice, whose laugh was deep and raucous. (It should be noted, lest the descriptor begin to feel like a cliché, that laughter was an art form among the monks. It came often, as a report of happiness, as a willingness to be happy, a manifestation of joy. But it was more. Though I didn’t understand their native Nepali, I did understand their laughter. For them, it possessed a hundred varieties and articulations, and they had an expression of laughter for each situation.)

Dagpo had been at this retreat for seven years. He hadn’t left this place in seven years, each day charged with the same task: editing and collating a collection of ancient Tibetan texts. In his workspace were the pillows on which he sat and a low table with a canted book holder upon it. Scattered nearby were various pens and highlighters in different fluorescent colors, an extra pair of glasses, a smartphone, and a big plastic bottle of Coke. The Tibetan book consisted of yellowed pages the size of giant bookmarks, with six long lines of writing per page. Dagpo was then perfecting the book—70 volumes in all—writing out his changes in Tibetan on new bookmark-pages, after which they would be taken down to the Shechen monastery and printed. He felt he had about three months to go, but it was painstaking work. Often he found himself hunting for days in search of meanings for antiquated words. He read other texts to inform his reading of this one. Did he ever get frustrated and think the whole thing was bullshit?

Not at all, he said. He’d learned so much from the book. When I asked him what he’d do to celebrate when finished, he laughed with an uncomfortable shyness and said he had no idea. When asked what came next, he said the same. A new path would eventually make itself known—who was he to force it?

For me, his life’s work only pointed up the fact that in the West we were obsessed with utilitarian knowledge. Often stupid stuff. Sometimes, in airports, I’d overhear someone speaking Tech or Sales, loudly throwing around words like “units” and “P2P packets,” bullying an assistant, cajoling a client. Matthieu called this “instrumentalizing,” or using people and knowledge to serve one’s own end rather than figuring out how we might serve one another, communally, which was another means to happiness. Was the relentless need to produce, scale, and monetize, to be evaluated and rewarded, a trap after all? The brands, the schools, the kind of car, what did it add up to? The World Health Organization claimed that people in wealthy countries were more depressed, at eight times the rate, than counterparts in poorer ones. Living in affluence seemed to mean you never had enough. Professional status was one more ego-feed, and as useless as the number of likes garnered for posting a picture of your kid playing a piece of celery in the school play. This was something Matthieu was very clear about: Once we deconstructed our egos, we could truly begin to see the world as a place inhabited by other people, some who might need our help. This dissolving, then, became all-powerful. “Our attachment to the ego is fundamentally linked to the suffering we feel and the suffering we inflict on others,” he said. “Freedom is the opposite.”

From Dagpo’s hermitage, we walked to Matthieu’s. The mountain was a swirl of sun-cloud-wind, hot-cold, gray-green, smelling of loam, with birdsong and village voices below. We scrambled down a steep knoll to what seemed like a shed, perched right at a cliff’s edge, with its panoramic view of valley and forest. The place was tiny, one room, really, and cramped. Inside, he had a bedroll and a small chest of drawers with all his possessions in the world: two robes, two sweaters, some books, a warm jacket or two for Tibet, where he returned from time to time, in part to build schools. He had a small kitchen, a postage-stamp lawn, and if he was lucky, for maybe—maybe—a total of two months a year, this was the place he called home, the one place he didn’t want photographed or usurped in any way, the one place that remains sacred to him as a refuge and source of energy. He only left here begrudgingly, when the long arm of need took hold, when he was called back to the monastery in Kathmandu, or to France/India/Bhutan/Tibet, when he was asked to explain to this gathering or that, in faraway Chile or Japan, one more time, how all of us might choose happiness in our lives.

But then, he was okay with that, too.

The only thing that seemed to make Matthieu Ricard unhappy was the moniker he hadn’t been able to escape, nor ever courted: the happiest man in the world. It really rankled him, though the rankling came with a smile, that constant bemusement again. It began with a magazine article after Happiness had been published, and the media just ran with it. “I know happier monks,” he said emphatically. “I really do. It’s absurd.” It posed a mild personal affront, too, because the suggestion was that he was more evolved somehow, and he knew monks in caves, literal caves, who’d been sitting there for a decade and counting, hunkered for the long haul, trying to find blissed enlightenment. At one point, torn between living a life of seclusion or as Buddhism’s second-biggest media star, he’d asked the Dalai Lama if he could go on an extended retreat, a disappearance he dreamed of and yearned for, but the Dalai Lama said, Not yet. The world is in spasm, and what you can do, what’s most necessary to do right now, is to try to communicate a cure.

Matthieu knew that among the major influences of one’s happiness was a kind of wistful “if only.” Or: “I wish it was different.” And that was another game, of course. The Dalai Lama had said, “If they want you to be the happiest man, be the happiest man.” Matthieu accepted his lot, and opened the doors wide to people like me, but still he wanted it known. “I’m happy,” he said, “but I know happier.”

Matthieu drew some of his advice on the matter of happiness from standard Buddhist doctrine: Attachment, grasping, and instrumentalizing, all driven by ego, needed to be acknowledged and smashed by something called “open presence” and altruistic loving-kindness. He said this as we were eating lunch on Dagpo’s porch the next day—dal, soy chunks, broccoli, and yogurt with pomegranate seeds. He’d been up since 4:30 a.m., the hour at which he’d begun his first meditation of the day. When he sneezed, it was as if a loud horn went off. He produced a tissue from his sleeve and wiped his nose, then rubbed his bald head, as if it was all part of an automatic reflex. (Like a Vegas magician, he made pens, scraps of paper, his smartphone, a sucker, appear from his sleeve. I kept waiting for the rabbit.) This was precious time for him, a rare respite for meditating and reading, and yet he was giving it to me. Sharing it with unbothered willingness. Being in his presence was to be infected by a floating kind of joy, an unthreatened eagerness to see the world, in its dark time, as capable of change, as a place containing infectious joy and happiness as well.

Sex—or the urge to have it—was, according to Matthieu, like a buzzing mosquito: easily ignored. (Monks are celibate. And sex falls into that category of a “mechanical quest for sensual pleasures” that ends in crippling “obsession and, ultimately, disenchantment.” In fact, there is a Buddhist saying: “For the lover, a beautiful woman/man is an object of desire; for the hermit, a distraction; for the wolf, a good meal.”) Flat-screen TVs were superfluous, though we thought they were central. “I don’t understand people with so much stuff it fills their garage,” said Matthieu, “so they have to park outside.” So much stuff hindered “genuine flourishing.” I nodded knowingly—what was with those unflourishing people? Because, damn, if he wasn’t describing our junky garage!

“Comparison is the killer of happiness,” said Matthieu. “We don’t compare ourselves with Bill Gates but with our neighbors.” True, subtly—or not-so-subtly—we were always tallying the cars in the neighbor’s driveway, the latest renovation, this neighbor’s trip to Yellowstone or that friend’s Mediterranean jaunt. And that exercise was one of futility, lifting us from the moment in which we were living, and forcing us to covet a moment in which we weren’t. Which raised another digital dilemma: the constant intrusion/onslaught of delectable images of consumption and their celebration by friends and neighbors.

“Good for them,” he said. “But why do you need it?” But didn’t we all crave comfort in the end? Didn’t he himself fly business class to his various conferences? His eyes grew wide. “Well, of course,” he said. “If they offer it, I take it! Sometimes I’m traveling out and back to a place like Chile, in two or three days. I remember that once I was asked to move to first class, and I said, ‘Oh no, I don’t think it’s good for a monk to be in first class.’ For me, that’s a waste of money.”

It was important to note, he said, that the quest for comfort—what he called “pleasant sensations”—wasn’t the same as happiness. “The idea of not confusing pleasant sensations with happiness doesn’t mean that we should at all shun pleasant sensations, or not take them when they come,” he said. “This is absolute nonsense. It would be absurd to give up something that could actually contribute to happiness! But pleasant sensations are highly impermanent and don’t guarantee happiness by nature.”

Sitting on that mountaintop, looking down on the world, the Himalayas hidden behind gray robes, Matthieu was clear about how we “blunted” pleasant sensations with excess. The same piece of music over hours was different from the first five minutes of listening to a beautiful song. Wonderful food, over-ingested, made one sick. Craving and grasping spoiled pleasant sensations. “If it doesn’t carry you away, it’s all fine. You take what comes,” he said. But once you flew business class, you didn’t forget the pleasure, right? So the next time you got on a plane, you were only reminded of the pleasure denied. It seemed like a metaphor for our Western culture. “Yes! Of course!” exclaimed Matthieu. “That’s what we call multiplying your suffering. It’s always comparison, not being satisfied.

“We have a Tibetan saying: To be content is like a treasure in your hand. Appreciate it when it comes and absolutely not miss it when it doesn’t.”

He evoked his own Super Monk, his master, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche: “These trains of thought and states of mind are constantly changing, like shapes of cloud in the sky, but we attach great importance to them.”

Matthieu’s gift, in part, was that he’d made himself the great translator of Buddhism for the masses (in Davos, in his TED talks, in his dozens upon dozens of appearances on YouTube), but one could still get lost in the swirling abstractions. And yet here was where Matthieu’s scientific brain kept working to pin the airiness of his own practice to living, quantifiable evidence. Not only was Buddhism a religion and a way of thought: Matthieu saw it as a science, too. So he was steeped in studies, and curried relationships with various social scientists and neuroscientists. Along with the Dalai Lama, he saw a burning need for global “secular ethics,” shed of religious and political doctrine, that might better guide the world and perhaps save it from violence. And since Matthieu knew we couldn’t all sit in a cave for seven years, staring at snowy Annapurna, he’d brought the world Happiness, and his other writings, in which the best Buddhist ideas were concentrated and translated into an applicable guide for our lives.

But, I wanted to know, were we changeable, or doomed, in the end? Matthieu flashed a smiling impatience. Of course, we were changeable! We contained molecules of greatness, the possibility of enlightenment! But some of us had lost our way. He told the story of a monk friend, standing in Times Square, looking up at the five-story advertisements and flashing gewgaws of capitalism, who said, “They’re trying to steal our minds.”

Meditation was one way to steal your mind back. And this was where the genetic scientist in Matthieu truly met the monk. He described a fascinating study, one in which he had participated, that arose from a collaboration between the Dalai Lama and a group of eminent scientists, to explore the intersection of Buddhism and science. The idea was to measure the brain waves of people in a meditative state of “open presence,” allowing all thoughts to come and go equally, floating in an equilibrium of acceptance. Eight monks, some of whom had been meditating in shaggy isolation for 30 years, were brought to Madison, Wisconsin, and along with ten American non-practitioners, were hooked up with 128 sensors to an EEG, which measured brain-wave activity. When asked to meditate on compassion, the monks generated the highest level of gamma waves, all firing in a rhythmic, harmonic manner; meanwhile, the novices registered very little activity. According to one of the study’s originators, the measured intensity of the gamma waves in the monks was “of a sort that has never been reported in the neuroscience literature.”

So could our gamma waves save the world?

When I asked Matthieu how his own stacked up, he laughed. “I was okay,” he said. The first session was supposed to have been a 20-minute meditation, and he’d gone two and a half hours. “But we pulled one monk out of a cave in Nepal,” he said. “He was the one with the strongest wave measurements. He was off the charts.” Another experiment had to do with the “startle response,” in which the monks and non-practitioners put on headphones and were told that they’d hear a loud explosion, and that they were to attempt to neutralize their reaction. The startle response, when exaggerated, is connected to negative emotion, but again, by comparison, the monks were able to take in the sound, react minimally, and let it go. The non-practitioners, not at all. It was an issue of un-grasping, said Matthieu, and because the monks had spent years practicing compassion and loving kindness, negativity was more likely to pass through. It wasn’t that Matthieu and his monks didn’t register anger or frustration from time to time; it’s that they tried to set it free as quickly as it came, osmotically.

This brought Matthieu back to our polarized world. “If I cling to an ideology, then, of course, anything that goes against it becomes a provocation,” he said. “With altruism, you don’t care about ideology, you care about the fate of people. And then it solves the issue: If you care about the fate of children, why would you want guns in the school? The most legitimate aspiration of any human beings is the basic wish not to suffer, the basic wish for well-being. Based on that, everything becomes so simple: You are ready, flexible, open, pragmatic…utilitarian in the good sense of the word, not instrumentalizing others.” This was the beginning of happiness. And maybe, if we were lucky, a revolution, too, grounded in a new secular ethics sparked by a kid hucking cell phones from his bedroom window. If so, one of its leaders would look a lot like this Matthieu Ricard, the French Buddhist monk, the O.G. of happiness from the Himalayas.

And then, like that, the spell was broken, and we spun back down through that same gray-purple murk, along the bumpy road to the Shechen monastery in Kathmandu. Among myriad demands on his time, Matthieu had to leave for France, to see his dear mother, 93 years old and a Buddhist herself. He had one day before his departure, and with all the things on his to-do list, he took time to show me around. But you could already feel it beginning to happen, his loss of privacy. He said, if lucky, he wouldn’t make it back to the mountain for three months. Here, it seemed everyone—everyone—wanted a word, or a meeting, not to mention the starstruck gagglers coming through, sunburnt trekkers, hard-core Western Buddhists, hoping for an autograph or audience. Matthieu’s demeanor never wavered, though. Even the absolute pests were greeted with smiles and big hellos. In his office, I watched as Matthieu got interrupted five times while trying to write an important e-mail. And just as he started for the sixth time, two travelers from Colombia showed up, wanting him to sign some of his books for them. When Matthieu assented, a whole stack appeared from one of their backpacks, and Matthieu’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at me and grinned.

It seemed so familiar: The collision of new resolutions and old, demanding reality. The ideal of the mountaintop and the impingements of responsibility that eroded the ideal. And yet, Matthieu maintained his equilibrium by allowing the intrusions, not as a hindrance but as another slalom turn in this landscape of happiness. Now we climbed the stairs in the central temple that had been damaged in the earthquake. He wanted to show me the master Khyentse’s prayer room, and then his chambers in back.

On the third floor, we entered. Off to the side, in shadows—holy shit! —a huge, life-size wax figure of Khyentse sat there looking down at us, all six-and-a-half feet of him. Matthieu was proud of that, the replica. The master—who’d lived in caves until he was 55, when he emerged and began teaching—was indeed a giant. At his cremation in Bhutan, 70,000 people attended, even the king, who got caught in a traffic jam. Matthieu pointed to a spot on the floor. That’s where he slept for more than a decade, no bed, no place to call his own. In the years before, if the master wanted a book from the library, Matthieu was the one to run and get it. If he needed a cup of tea, it was Matthieu again. All those demands and intrusions. But it was no problem, he said.

And what devotion looked like, I supposed.

We had one last stop to make before Matthieu’s departure, to visit Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche, or the reincarnated Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, now a 23-year-old. The story of how Yangsi had been found was astonishing in itself, of the kind that skeptics often disparage. After Khyentse had passed away, a monk in the west of the country sent word that he’d had a dream, that the reincarnated Khyentse could be found in a neighborhood near the Shechen monastery. The dream provided just enough distinguishing traits that the monks, scouring the area, were able to find the boy. Matthieu reserved judgment, until taking a trip with the boy in Bhutan. It had been a habit of the original master, Khyentse, when relating something important to Matthieu, to grasp his ear gently, with affection, as if to say, Listen. The moment when Matthieu realized that the boy was his reincarnated master came while they were bouncing along bad roads in Bhutan. In the front seat, the boy turned to Matthieu in the backseat, smiled, and tenderly grabbed hold of his ear.

Yangsi now possessed his own suite inside the monastery walls, where he was receiving visitors all day. The constant inflow of masala tea and cookies had left him a little doughy and soporific. His wide face was topped with a brush cut of thick, dark hair, and his head seemed oversize compared with the rest of his body, as if he were still growing into being the full Khyentse. Approaching the chair in which Yangsi sat, Matthieu bowed and held the young man’s hand to his forehead. They spoke for a while in Tibetan, and it seemed strange to watch Matthieu, so prolific and intellectually powerful, bow before anyone. Except, in this cosmology, he was bowing again before Khyentse, his master, too. After a while, Matthieu invited me to ask a question, any question, please. I understood that Matthieu himself would translate. So I asked a pretty blunt question: It must feel impossible to live up to being this guy—no, this legend—you didn’t know but supposedly are?

Yangsi sparked to life. “Tell me about it, man!” he rejoined in perfect English, and I nearly choked on my cookie. “I look at him, and he’s my idol,” said Yangsi. “But I’m supposed to be him. I hear all these stories. Like, 30 years in a cave. I’m still getting ready for my first retreat.” It was meant to be three years, three months, and three days, but he was worried he wouldn’t make it. He was already fairly content. He talked about having these handwritten letters from his previous life, from Khyentse, artifacts of insight and greatness. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. He spoke about generosity, dharma, happiness, but it was an apprentice’s rehearsal. “We young lamas,” he said, “we get lost in our screens.”

That, he said, was the greatest danger: his smartphone and every distraction in it.