 Mahāyāna Buddhists believe that this fundamental error is rooted in beginningless karmic tendencies. Our minds have been conditioned by our previous actions, and we experience the world through their capacities and strictures. Our karmic conditioning provides the conceptual nexus through which we think and communicate with other beings who have similar karma and therefore similar conceptual tendencies. This karmic basis of conceptualization and language, which finds them both to be pragmatically beneficial while fundamentally erroneous, is the lynchpin of Sapaṇ’s philosophical position in the Treasury. Against his contemporaries, who rely upon concepts and linguistic objects being quasi-real entities in order to account for cognition and language, Sapaṇ explains the utility of concepts, and the linguistic entities to which they are tied, with reference to the same process that makes them erroneous: the never-ending causal flow of karma. Like floating hairs that appear due to ophthalmic disease, cognitive objects are nothing but a failure in the system, and have no independent reality.