From a Buddhist point of view, the first thing to help is yourself, to get your own mind together. And to really understand how to benefit beings, not just on the physical level, but on all levels. Then there are endless beings you can benefit.

We all have our own karma and so different teachers will be meaningful to different students.

If you see young tulkus when they're with other little monks, it's like in a Broadway show or something where the main character is spotlighted and the others kind of fade into the background. And you think, who is that tulku? Because that's all you see, even though they're all dressed the same and they're all the same age, but it's like the tulku is illumined. They don't look like the other ones.

The Buddha himself said, "I still use conceptual thinking, but I'm not formed by it." And that's the Buddha.

There are wars, there's pestilence, there are plagues, there is corruption in religious circles, corruption in the government, when was it not?

What I like about Tibetan Buddhism is it was taken to Tibet in the 7th century and then again in the 11th. It has everything that had been collected in India up until that time. And so on all levels, it's so vast.

Western Tibetan Buddhists are always looking out there at the distant snow peaks and they lose the flowers along the path.