The person you love has all kinds of seeds in her: joy, suffering, and anger. If you water her anger, then in just five minutes you can bring the ang… - Thích Nhất Hạnh

Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now when will we have peace and joy — tomorrow, or after tomorrow? What is presenting us from being happy right now?

But sharing does not mean wanting others to abandon their own spiritual roots and embrace your faith. That would be cruel. People are stable and happy only when they are firmly rooted in their own tradition and culture. To uproot them would make them suffer. There are already enough people uprooted from their tradition today, and they suffer greatly, wandering around like hungry ghosts, looking for something to fill their spiritual needs. We must help them return to their tradition. Each tradition must establish dialogue with its own people first, especially with those young people who are lost and alienated. During the last fifteen years while sharing the Buddha’s Dharma in the West, I always urged my Western friends to go back to their own traditions and rediscover the values that are there, those values they have not been able to touch before. The practice of Buddhist meditation can help them do so, and many have succeeded. Buddhism is made of non-Buddhist elements. Buddhism has no separate self. When you are a truly happy Christian, you are also a Buddhist. And vice versa.

The source of suffering is a false belief in permanence and the existence of separate selves.