The Buddha said: Since the time without beginning, all living
beings have given rise to all sorts of inversion because of the
karmic seed (of ignorance) which is like the aksa shrub(The aksa
seed is threefold and so illustrates the simultaneous character of
illusion, action and suffering).
This is why seekers of the Truth
fail to realize Supreme Enlightenment but achieve only (the states
of) Sravakas(arhats), pratyeka-buddhas, heretics, devas and demons,
solely because they do not know the two basic inversions, thereby
practising wrongly like those who cannot get food by cooking sand
in spite of the passing of aeons as countless as the dust. What are
these two basic inversions? Ananda, the first is the basic root of
birth and death caused, since the time without beginning, by the
wrong use of a clinging mind which people mistake for their own
nature, and the second is their attachment to causal conditions
(which screen) the basically bright essence of consciousness which
is the fundamentally pure and clean substance of Nirvanic
Enlightenment. Thus they ignore this basic brightness and so
transmigrate through (illusory) realms of existence without
realizing the futility of their (wrong) practice.