Ignorance

Student: "Teach me the way to liberation."
Monk: "Who binds you?"
Student: "No one binds me."
Monk: "Then why seek liberation?"

Our prison, our dungeon, is in us. It's in our own minds, our own thinking. We strap ourselves in chains of our own making, and we do the same to each other. We train our children in the ways of bondage.

All this is based on ignorance. We don't see what we are. We don't see our situation for what it is, nor do we see how to deal with it. As the Chinese philosopher Yang Chu once said, we pass by the joys of life without knowing we've missed anything.