Meet Mr Happy

Bring to your mind a past occasion of inner joy and happiness," writes Matthieu Ricard in his new book Happiness: A Guide To Developing Life's Most Important Skill. "Recall how you felt. Consider the lasting effect this experience has had on your mind, and how it still nourishes a sense of fulfilment."

"Now this," I tell Ricard, "was the point where I started to run into trouble. However long I worked at this meditation exercise, the memory that kept coming back to me was of the evening in May 1999 when I was sitting in the Nou Camp in Barcelona, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the injury-time goal that won the Champions' League for Manchester United."

"I would suggest that what you experienced that night was elation. And elation is not really what we mean by happiness. It would be an interesting experiment for you to relive that night, and assess what you actually gained from it."

"You're right," I tell him, remembering how, once the euphoria had worn off, I was left contemplating the same void that has been described by countless sports fans, from Frederick Exley, author of the classic A Fan's Notes, to Doug Stanhope, American comedian and follower of the Boston Red Sox.

"When I woke up the next morning," I tell him, "my head still ached, I was still working for a magazine editor who loathed me, and my laptop was still broken. Now that I come to think about it, Manchester United had done absolutely nothing for me."

"Because elation is a transient thing - not true spiritual fulfilment."

"But if I achieve spiritual fulfilment, will I lose interest in going to Old Trafford?"

"Absolutely not. That's one of the mistakes people make: that a serene, balanced mind is a dull mind. I love football."

Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, 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. It's a somewhat flattering title, he says, given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology, which involves attaching 256 sensors to the skull, and three hours' continuous MRI scanning.

The fact remains that, out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers' results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him - a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis.

"It's true," he concedes, "that I was well outside the normal parameters."

As a young man, Matthieu Ricard, 60, was regarded as one of the most promising biologists of his generation. He completed a starred PhD at the Institut Pasteur under the supervision of Nobel prize- winner Francois Jacob, but abandoned his scientific career in 1972, when he moved to Darjeeling. There, he devoted himself to studying under Kangyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan master in the Nyingma tradition: the most ancient school of Buddhism. He has been a monk, and celibate, since he was 30. Ricard still lives at the Schechen Monastery in Nepal.

All proceeds from his books go to funding hospitals and schools in Tibet - which makes it feel barely appropriate that we should be meeting in a large apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, an area roughly comparable to Mayfair. The monk explains that the flat - sparsely decorated with Tibetan artwork, and pictures of the Dalai Lama - belongs to a wealthy philanthropist who has moved to the country. Before I met Ricard, who greeted me in his maroon robes, I confess to having harboured some scepticism about his good works. But within minutes of speaking to him, I can tell that the $30m mansion in Malibu, where he secretly retires to snort cocaine off the thighs of Lithuanian hookers, in the tradition of innumerable TV evangelists, cannot conceivably exist. In the foreword to Happiness, the psychologist Dr Daniel Goleman describes how a three-hour wait at an airport "sped by in minutes, due to the sheer pleasure of Matthieu's orbit" - a phrase which had made me faintly nauseous when I first read it. Now, it seems to make perfect sense. Ricard exudes a sense of tranquillity, kindness and - surprisingly enough - humour.

Versatility has been the keynote in his life. An outstanding goalkeeper in his youth, Matthieu Ricard also enjoys an international reputation as a photographer, and was lauded by Cartier-Bresson. He shows me pictures he's taken of the idyllic view from his hermitage. Having myself been described by Private Eye as " journaliste miserable" - harshly I think, given that, of the "84,000 negative emotions" described in Buddhist teaching, there are at least a dozen that I haven't yet experienced - I feel obliged to concede to Ricard that I may have something to learn from him.

"On the other hand," I ask the monk, "how hard is it to be happy when you live on a mountainside with breathtaking views of the Himalayas, where your only concern is polishing your wind chimes? What if you had my life, living in the shadow of the new Arsenal stadium, the streets crowded with vengeful Cockney van drivers, the supermarkets staffed by cashiers who pass on the oppression of their wretched existence by drumming their fingers and flinging goods down the checkout at a speed that would have tested Peter Schmeichel in his prime? Not that I'm saying you'd be any happier where I grew up in Manchester, where two of my three uncles have been fired at with Uzis..."