Caves are beautiful things you know. They're thermostatically controlled - warm when it's cold out and cool when it's warm. Very quiet. Nobody there. Especially in the winter - it was perfect. Also, because it's a cave, you can't do much with it.

We've been human countless times and done everything you can imagine. So we've been planting all these negative seeds, and they're going to come up.

To really be of benefit to others as the Buddha always taught, we ourselves must first get out of the swamp. One of the quickest and most effective ways to do this is in isolation, with very few distractions, working very hard at it and spending all your time and efforts at changing your mind.

One of the beauties of the Buddhadharma is there are so many approaches, and not everything is right for everybody.

Every country that meets Buddhism molds it into their own indigenous religion, as America will. A very clear example of this is Japan, which threw out almost all the dharma, and just kept that essence, which spoke to them.

People talk over and over about bodhichitta, but so often their heart is quite cold.

The first thing is to learn how to quiet the mind, relax the mind, and bring the awareness to the front so that we are conscious of what we're doing when we're doing it without all the commentary.