..續本文上一頁es: "What exactly is the teaching that the Blessed One proclaims whereby one can avoid all quarrels and, at the same time, be free from the pernicious influence of craving

　　" The Buddha answers with the following pithy statement:

　　"Bhikkhus, as to the source through which perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a person: if nothing is found there to delight in, welcome, and hold to, this is the end of the underlying tendencies to lust, aversion, views, doubt, conceit, the desire for being, and ignorance; this is the end of reliance on rods and weapons, of quarrels, brawls, disputes, recrimination, malice, and false speech; here these evil unwholesome states cease without remainder."

　　Having said this, before the monks even have time to ask for an explanation, the Lord rises from his seat and enters his dwelling.

　　After the Buddha has retired, the bhikkhus ponder his statement, and realizing that they cannot understand it on their own, they consider: "The Venerable Maha Kaccana is praised by the Teacher and esteemed by his wise companions in the holy life. He is capable of expounding the detailed meaning. Suppose we went to him and asked him the meaning of this."

　　When they approach Maha Kaccana and make their request, he first chides them for coming to him rather than asking the Buddha to clarify it. To come to him when the Blessed One is present, he says, is like seeking heartwood among the branches and leaves of a great tree after passing over the trunk. The Blessed One is the one who knows and sees; he is vision, he is knowledge, he has become the Dhamma, become the holy one; he is the sayer, the proclaimer, the elucidator of meaning, the giver of the Deathless, the Lord of the Dhamma, the Tathagata.

　　The bhikkhus, however, while admitting that the elder”s reproach is warranted, still insist that he himself is able to explain the meaning. Finally the elder consents and then gives the following explanation of the Buddha”s brief statement:

　　"Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a person with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye."

　　The same pattern is repeated for each of the other sense bases. The elder then connects the entire exposition with the principle of conditionality, showing how each term in the series arises in dependence on the preceding term and ceases with the cessation of its predecessor.

　　This passage, rich in implications, offers a penetrative account of the process by which the deluded mind becomes overwhelmed by its own imaginary creations — its distorted perceptions and mental constructs. The sequence begins as a straightforward description of the conditioned genesis of cognition: each type of consciousness arises in dependence on its respective sense faculty and object. The process unfolds in the natural order through contact, feeling, and perception as far as the stage of thinking. But in the unenlightened worldling, who lacks correct insight into the true nature of things, at the stage of thought cognition is vitiated by the influence of papañca, a difficult Pali word best rendered as "conceptual proliferation."[17] Instead of correctly comprehending the objects of perception, the deluded mind, infiltrated by papañca, spins out a complex mental commentary which embellishes things with the erroneous notions of "mine," "I," and "my self." Thereby the person is overrun by "perceptions and notions tinge…

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