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the mind, can the problem be solved. You should maintain
awareness not to interfere with the functioning of the mind or to
become absorbed or become one with the mind.
Let me explain what these tubers of the mind are like.
Say you visit your farm in the summer and find nothing growing
in it. You will think that the farm is clean but I tell you to wait
and see what happens after it rains. After a good rain you
will see all kinds of greenery on it, all kinds of creepers
everywhere. Where did these creepers come from? Each
creeper had a rhizome under the ground, which sprouted
with the first shower of rain. Then if you uproot all the
creepers, you’ll feel happy that your farm is completely clean.
I would tell you that you could only say it is clean, if it
remains free from any creepers after three years of rain.
Only then can you consider that your farm is free of any
tubers (nirgrantha). Similarly this mind is made up of tubers,
the bigger the tuber about a specific topic, the greater the
number of thoughts about that topic and the smaller the tuber,
the fewer the thoughts. For example, if you ask a young
Vanik (vegetarian sect) boy how many times he thinks about
eating meat, he would tell you that in all his twenty years he
has thought about it only a few times. This means that his
tuber of eating meat is a small one, the size of a beetle nut.
Now, if we were to ask a Muslim boy the same question, he
would tell you that he thinks about eating meat several times
a day. This means that his tuber of eating meat is very large,
the size of a large sweet potato. If you ask a Jain child, he
will tell you that the thought of eating meat never crosses his
mind, meaning he has no such tubers at all.
If you were to plot a graph about your thoughts and what
they are about, over a period of a month, a week and a day,
you would come to know the kind and the size of tubers you
have. You will have only about five or ten large ones and these