Ignorance Is a Problem If that is so, how does samsara come about? In the beginning of Entering the Middle Way, Chandrakirti explains: First you think “I” and cling to a self, Then you think “mine” and cling to things.” (Ch. 1, v3ab) Like a turning water wheel, you circle around in samsara due to  clinging to an “I,” and once you have fixated on this self, there is  “mine,” what belongs to you, and then comes the “other,” those seen as  enemies, and so forth. This is the usual way that samsara  appears—through clinging to “I” and “mine” and then “self” and “other.”  This kind of grasping is the cause of all faults. Nagarjuna writes, “Coming entirely from the cause of ignorance.” Due  to ignorance, we take something to remain over time, which it cannot do;  we grasp onto a referent where there is none; and we take something to  have a root when it does not. Coarse clinging to things as real and the  subtler clinging to characteristics as real are both caused by  ignorance. Until you realize how ignorance is, you will continue to  suffer. As much as you wish to be free of suffering that much effort  should you make to be free of its cause, ignorance. If that is the case,  what do you need to discard? Nagarjuna’s fourth line counsels: Beginning, middle, and end are entirely left behind. Grasping onto these three should be released back into their ground  because these are all forms of clinging to permanence. And “permanence”  is merely a concept imputed by your intellect; ultimately, it has no  essence or core. As Nagarjuna states: Without essence like a hollow plantain tree, Like a city of gandharvas in the sky. There are many examples for this absence of an essence, which is  mistakenly taken to exist. Mind is caught in discursive thinking that  projects a nonexistent reality. In the context of mahamudra, however,  this process would be called the dynamism or the display of luminosity,  clarity, or the cognizant quality (gsal ba) that is part of mind’s nature. Not knowing this to be the case, you take these projections of your  discursive mind to be real and wander, as Nagarjuna explains, in “a  stupefying urban scene difficult to bear.” So benighted in taking  phenomena to be real, you do not recognize that they are the dynamic  energy and play of mind; you fixate on appearances and concretize them  into self and other. Ultimately, however, the source of these  appearances is primordial wisdom aware of its own nature. It is mere  ignorance that creates the illusion of self and other, this projection  of your afflictions, so you wander in a delusive world: It’s a stupefying urban scene difficult to bear Where beings appear as illusions.