I was recently asked this question:

You often say you try to give away the essence of what you know every time you speak, including in interviews like this. What is the essence of what you know?\

Buddha was absolutely right: Life is a bitch, and then you die. That’s a good translation of the first of the four great truths Buddha gave us in his famous first talk. It’s undeniably true, life is unsatisfactory in so many ways, life is suffering, but there are other great truths as well, fortunately, because it is also undeniably true that there is a state of being that is beyond suffering.