 Drawing on the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, Mādhyamika authors offered various analogies to try to illustrate what it is like for things to lack any intrinsic nature. Of these, probably the most helpful and illuminating is the analogy of a mirage, found, for instance, at ŚS 256. In drawing out this analogy, the first thing to notice is that a mirage is something that exists. Someone who simply denied reports that, on hot days, roads sometimes appear to be covered with pools of water, thus entirely rejecting the existence of mirages, would thereby hold a mistaken view. Similarly, according to the Madhyamaka view, ordinary conventional things, including shoes and ships and sealing-wax, actually do exist. On the other hand, a mirage is deceptive: the way in which it exists is not the same as the way in which it appears to exist. Similarly, the objects of our everyday experience appear to us to exist by way of intrinsic nature, while in fact they exist conventionally. Moreover, a mirage arises from causes and conditions; just so, ordinary conventional things arise from causes and conditions. Finally, and more controversially, a mirage is something that exists only from a certain point of view. In the same way—although not all interpreters of Madhyamaka would accept this way of putting it—ordinary things exist only from the perspective of particular conceptual schemes, and not in a robustly objective way, not “from their own side”.