Illuminating the Intent

When he examines in this manner, and seeing with his wisdom that all afflictions, such as attachment, and faults — birth, aging, sickness, death, and so on — stem from the identity view grasping at the perishable collection: an afflicted intelligence that apprehends in terms of intrinsically existent “I” and “mine.”

All of these [afflictions], without exception, are in fact effects of the identity view grasping at the perishable collection.

When one sees this, the wish to eliminate this identity view will emerge.

A person with sharp intelligence will at this point come to recognize that elimination of [the identity view] requires seeing how the self as conceived by this identity view has no objective existence, just as stated in the passages quoted above from Praise to the Ultimate Expanse and Four Hundred Stanzas.

This is because self is the object of “I”-grasping.

This means the person who wishes to eliminate all the woes and faults needs to eliminate the identity view, which can be done by comprehending that the self — the focus of the identity view — has no self-existence or essential reality.

Therefore the yogi will examine first, “Does this self, the object of my grasping at selfhood, have essential existence or not?”

The yogi then engages in negation of such inherently real selfhood.

The Compendium of Training states:

Since the root has been cut off, none of the afflictions will ever reemerge.

This is as explained in the Secrets of the Tathāgata Sutra:

When a tree is felled from its roots, all its limbs and leaves as well as all the tiny branches come to dry up.

So too, Śāntimati, when the identity view is extinguished, all the afflictions and their derivatives come to be extinguished.