When we come to the table, we shouldn't negotiate right away. We should spend time walking together, eating together, making acquaintance, telling each other about our own suffering, without blame or condemnation. It takes maybe one, two, three weeks to do that. And if communication and understanding are possible, negotiation will be easier. So if I am to organize a peace negotiation, I will organize it in that way.

The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.

Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.

When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind - a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object.

Water flows from high in the mountains Water runs deep in the Earth Miraculously, water comes to us, And sustains all life.

I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.