Lama Zopa Rinpoche

There are sentient beings who are arya beings, who have the direct realization of emptiness
only, shunyata. When their mind is in equipoise meditation they don’t have the dualistic
mind, the appearance of true existence. However, in the post-meditation break time, they
have the hallucination. Even with bodhicitta and compassion, they still all have the
appearance of true existence. For us, however, the moment after the mind merely imputes
the I, it appears back as a real I, not as a merely imputed I. This is a huge hallucination. How
does that hallucination happen?
Take color, for instance. We see light appearing from an object, such as black letters on
white paper or a bunch of roses appearing as white and red. Or when we are driving and see
a traffic light appearing as red, we stop. The red color appears to exist from there but
actually it is our mind that has imputed that red. We don’t see that this is so. Just as with the
I, everything that appears to our senses appears in this way. There is this hallucination. This
is exactly what the Heart Sutra refutes.
To understand how all phenomena appear like this, the I is a good example. The reason the
merely labeled I appears as a real I is because of past ignorance holding the I as truly
existent, while it is not, while it is totally empty of existing from its own side. That particular
ignorance has left a negative imprint on the mind and that negative imprint projects. Firstly,
depending on the base, the mind merely imputes the I, then in the next moment the negative
imprint left by the past ignorance projects the real I. It projects it just as a film put into a
movie projector is projected onto a screen. The real I has never existed in that way and it will
never exist in that way.
And then, in the third moment, we believe that this I really exists as it appears. In Tibetan it
is called ti-mug ten-dzin ma-rig-pa, the ignorance holding the I as truly existent. That concept,
that this is real, is the root of samsara, the root of all the sufferings of samsara. It is where all
the suffering of rebirth comes from, where all the suffering of sickness comes from, where
all the suffering of old age comes from, where all the suffering of death comes from, where
all the suffering of pain comes from.
If, for example, we don’t want cancer, we have to realize emptiness and eliminate this gross
wrong concept of the self-existent I. By eliminating it, none of the three poisonous minds of
attachment, anger or ignorance or any of the other delusions can happen and we therefore
cannot experience the oceans of the suffering of samsara.
Similarly, what is the root of all our depression? Some people get depressed when the sun
sets, some at night, some in the morning, but always at a fixed time. For some it is
dependent on the situation. Some people spend years and years suffering from depression.
Where does it come from? It comes from this root, this wrong concept from where all the
suffering of pain originates.
With respect to the suffering of change, all temporary samsaric pleasures—pleasures that
neither last nor increase—arise because they are in the nature of suffering. This also comes
from the same wrong concept.
These two types of suffering, of pain and of change, come from the third type of suffering,
pervasive compounding suffering, the root of all these sufferings. For Buddhists, this is what
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