 Dreamscape presents The Monk and the Philosopher. A father and son discuss the meaning of life by Jean-François Révelle and Mathieu Ricard, narrated by David Shaw Parker. Forward by Jack Miles. Conversation is at once the most primitive and the most refined expression of the human mind. We rightly cast even the experience of solitary insight in the dialogue form. It occurred to me. It came to me, as if it had something to say and wanted me to listen, as if it wanted to start something. The conversation that fills this book is one that may well start something, especially as the reader begins to talk back. As in the Louis Mal film, My Dinner with André, Mathieu Ricard and Jean-François Révelle talk of ideas, but the mood that lingers throughout their talk is intimate. The two are in sharp disagreement about issues that each considers of great moment, yet each cares about the other as well as about the outcome of their debate. Ricard, the younger man, a doctor of molecular biology, worked for some time with Nobel Prize-winning French biologists François Yacob and Jacques Monot at the renowned Institut Pasteur in Paris. Then, still early in his career, he surprised family and friends by leaving Paris for an apprenticeship with Tibetan spiritual masters in Darjeeling, India, an apprenticeship that led before long to a true conversion to Buddhism. Ricard now lives in Nepal and devotes much of his time to the translation into French and English of Tibetan literature, both ancient and modern. Révelle, the older man, Ricard's father, is a philosopher and political commentator influential on both sides of the Atlantic. Best known here for works like Without Marks or Jesus and The Totalitarian Temptation, he is also the author of works of philosophically informed cultural commentary like The Flight from Truth, The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. In their dialogue, Ricard defends the validity of his own life-changing experience of enlightenment. His response to what he found in Darjeeling did not entail, as he saw it, any repudiation of what he knew as a scientist. Though admittedly a subjective experience, it was valid in its own way and as worthy of intellectual respect as objective science. Révelle doubts the ultimate validity of Ricard's or any experience of which no object, neutral account can be given. He maintains that any truth claim not accessible at some level to the methods of science must rest ultimately on religious faith and the leap of faith is one he declines to make. The issue between them, in some, is whether Tibetan Buddhism meditation may be understood as a humane secular practice uncomplicated by quasi-religious commitments, hostages to metaphysics, so to speak. Révelle sees hostages, Ricard sees none, or no more than are surrendered by science itself. The experience in question may be one that few Americans have had, but it is one of which most Americans have heard. The Zen Buddhism of Japan has had a substantial American following since the 1950s. In more recent years, the Dalai Lama has become an international celebrity. Within the past year, Buddhism, Tibetan rather than Japanese, has been on the cover of Time Magazine. By and large, however, the American frame of reference for the Buddhist experience has remained either historical, as in the College World Religion Survey course, or therapeutic and quasi-religious, as in the wide variety of settings where meditation continues to be taught as a technique for stress reduction or inner peace. For American science and philosophy, Buddhism has generally not been an item on the agenda. Whence the novelty and the interest in a debate about Buddhism conducted by a French scientist turned monk and a French fellow? Sample complete. Ready to continue?