The Tree of Enlightenment

Madhyamaka is concerned with dispelling these products of discriminating
thought because they are the causes of suffering. It is
as a result of discriminating the ideas of cause and effect, identity
and difference, existence and nonexistence, and so forth that we
are imprisoned in samsara. Discriminating thought, which has
its seed in the mind, is the fundamental cause of suffering.
Nagarjuna says that, just as a painter, having painted the picture
of a fearful demon, is then terrified by that image, so ignorant
people, through discriminating thought, produce the cycle
of the six realms of existence and then suffer as a consequence.
Hence mind, which is afflicted by ignorance through the function
of discriminating thought, produces the world we know, or
samsara, where the concepts of causality, origination, cessation,
and the rest have a meaning. is is the origin of suffering. And
if samsara is the product of discriminating thought – if cause and
effect, identity and difference, and existence and nonexistence
are actually relative and empty – then there is no objective difference
between samsara and nirvana.
What the renowned Mahayana and Madhyamaka doctrine
of the non-differentiation of samsara and nirvana means is that
the difference between samsara and nirvana is a subjective difference,
a difference within one’s own mind. It is not a difference
in anything objective or real. Samsara and nirvana are the same
thing seen from two different points of view: from the point of
view of ignorance (of causality, identity and difference, existence
and nonexistence), reality appears as samsara; from the point of
view of insubstantiality, relativity, and emptiness, however, reality
appears as nirvana.
us samsara and nirvana do not depend on anything ‘out
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