Try to develop some genuine love and compassion, some real caring for others.

I'd say look at the teacher's students. Do you want to be like them? If you see a good and harmonious sangha, and if they're practicing well and are good people with good hearts, then you have a cause for trust.

In the early '60s there was very little reliable information on Tibetan Buddhism. I was living in London and I had joined the Buddhist Society. For the most part, people there were either interested in Theravada or Zen Buddhism. There was almost no one into Tibetan Buddhism at that time.

The new nuns don't know that they're 'supposed' to be meek and submissive, and so in many ways they believe they can do anything, because they've seen the earlier ones do it. In this way, there's nothing for them to doubt.

When I heard that our bodies change when we get a bit older, I thought, oh good, now I'll go back to being a boy again. But it didn't happen like that.

Buddhism helps us to overcome our endless ego grasping mind to open up to something so much more spacious and genuinely meaningful.

Just because someone is very charismatic, it doesn't mean that they're genuinely qualified.