Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c21.s2.7

c21.s2.7

But we must not think that internal reality is any more absolutely real—at any rate on the orthodox view—than external reality. The apparent distinction of subject, object, and knowledge is not real. Thought cannot know itself any more than anything else, or there would be duality, and it would not be pure thought. The internal chain of causality, therefore, must not be regarded as anything real. It is merely the result of the infection of the purity of thought. This infection is the source of the illusion of subject, object, and knowledge, but its origin we cannot trace; there is no beginning in time to the process of illusion. The infection of our thought produces in us the holding of belief in eternity, in happiness, and induces us to action, good or bad, and these acts and thoughts leave within us the tendencies which produce again the same wrong views and acts, and continue for ever, unless enlightenment is attained, the process of illusion.²