"Contentment, tolerance, and charity: these are the treasures that this culture has nurtured, taught, and passed on to children from generation to generation for ages."
A significant phrase of the Dalai Lama: "Happy is not he who has much, but he who needs little."
"The people in the mountains are honest, friendly and peace-loving people. You Austrians are also a mountain people like us Tibetans."
"I would like to do my part, like Heinrich Harrer, the Linz Jesuit priest Johann Gruber or many other travelers once did, to pass on what they have experienced in order to give others the chance to learn from what has been handed down."
A book in which I have collected my experiences here in the Himalayas for almost a quarter of a century, listening to the stories of my Tibetan friends in order to make a small contribution to understanding the decades-long struggle for their occupied homeland" in order to learn from it myself.
How a man acts, how one walks, such a one he becomes.
He who acts well becomes something good, he who acts evil becomes something evil!
"From the Upanishads"
Again and again I try to bring my travel experiences to book, I don't want to succeed, impossible, my head is sucked full and influenced by a hectic, tireless, never resting capitalist-western world.
As a traveler between two such wonderful worlds, so different and yet so similar cultures, I try to pass on what I have experienced, to mediate and to write it down in order to learn from it.
I found my peace in the Indian mountains, my serenity in the monasteries of the Himalayas, Tibet became my second home, if there is such a thing as rebirth then I was once one of them.
Our Western capitalist culture, with its valuable knowledge, is sinking into a sad social prosperity that is destroying much of what our mothers and fathers worked so hard to build and pass on to us.
