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BUDDHISM (avidyā), is the problem--nothing less and nothing more. Such ignorance is a natural function of the life-process, yet not necessarily incradicable; no more ineradicable than the innocence of a child. It is simply that we do not know that we are moving in a world of more conventions and that our feelings, thoughts, and acts are determined by these. We imagine that our ideas about things represent their ultimalc reality, and so we are bound in by them as by the meshes of a not. Thcy are rooted in our own consciousness and attitudes; mcre creations of the mind; conventional, involuntary patterns of secing things, judging, and behaving; yet our ignorame accepts them in every detail, without question, regarding them and their contents as the facts of existence. This--this mistake about the uue essence of reality -is the cause of all the sufferings that constitute our lives.
The Buddhist analysis goes on to state that our other symptoms (the familiar incidents and situations of our universal condition of non-well being) are derivatives, one and all, of the primary fault. The tragedics and comcdics in which we get ourselves involved, which we bring forth from ourselves and in which we act, develop spontancously from the impetus of our innermost condition of non-knowing. This sends us forth in the world with restricted senses and conceptions. Unconscious wishes and expectations, emanating from us in the shape of subjectively determined decisions and acts, transcend the limits of the present; they precipitate for us the future, being themselves determined from the past. Inherited from former births, they cause future births, the endless stream of life in which we are carried along being greater far than the bounds of individual birth and death. In other words, the ills of the individual cannot be understood in terins of the individual's mistakes; they are rooted in our human way of life, and the whole content of This way of life is a pathological blend of unfulfilled cravings, vexing longings, fears, regrets, and pains. Such a state of suffer
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