The Majjhima Nikaya is a collection of 152 discourses, called middle-length discourses, given by the Buddha, Shakyamuni. The first of these discourses is called the Mula Pariyaya Sutta. This has been translated as meaning “the root of all things”, or you could say the crucial condition, the crucial condition for all Buddhist teachings.
In this sutra, the Buddha talks about how we regard the things that we encounter - the phenomena & the concepts - whether they are concrete or whether they are abstract, whatever, everything that comes into our mind.
The Buddha says an untaught ordinary person regards earth as earth, water as water, things as they are. Having perceived them as such, such a person conceives himself as being, in this case earth, conceives himself as part of earth or conceives earth as part of him.
He conceives himself perhaps apart from earth or he conceives earth in some way to be his own. He, in other words, involves himself in his conception of the things that he encounters. In other words, he doesn't encounter things cleanly.
He encounters things with a tinge, a halo, a condition of self injected into it. Whether the element of self is “I'm like that” or “I'm not like that” or “That's part of me” or “That's not part of me” or “What does this say about me?” or “What can I do with this?”, is immaterial. It's the element of introducing the sense of self into one's conceptualization of the things that one encounters, any things that one encounters, whether they are abstract things, like one's country, money and so on, or whether they are concrete things like this flower from the garden, this piece of stone, this air, this water and so on.
Even the Buddhist doctrines, he's saying that when an ordinary person encounters the four noble truths or encounters the seven factors of enlightenment, immediately the ego comes in and seeks to colonize or appropriate this concept that has now entered into the mind. And it is this this way in which the ego, as it were, gobbles everything up or turns it to its own purpose that is the root of all our spiritual-psychological problem.
The person in Buddhist training, in Buddhist practice, attempts to unhook himself from this tendency, from this process - attempts to see things just as they are. He sees the tree as the tree. He sees earth as earth. He sees water as water. And the sutra even goes on to say this is just how the Buddha sees them.
It's not that the Buddha sees things in some mysterious way. The Buddha sees a tree as a tree. The Buddha sees the earth as earth. Just the same as everybody else. But he doesn't inject into his seeing the tree as a tree some idea of ego. He doesn't inject into it “This is my tree,” or “I could be a tree,” or “I'm not a tree,” or... and so on.
The element of ego contaminates our conception of things and is the root of all of the dukkha that we create for ourselves and for others.
Thank you very much.
Namo Amida Bu.
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