Buddhist thought and practice are said to have emerged out of sustained practical commitment to discovering and nullifying the roots of human suffering. Canonical accounts of the liberation of Buddhism’s founding figure, Siddhartha Gautama, make it clear that becoming one awakened (buddha) to the origins and ending of suffering was not a process of rational distillation, but rather of one of embodied conduct (see, e.g., Majjhima Nikāya 26). The pivotal insights afforded by such conduct are, first, that all things arise and pass away in dynamic interdependence (paticca-samuppāda), and, secondly, that conflict and suffering (dukkha) are relational distortions marking the troubling inflection of interdependence as a function of ignorance (avijjā); corporeal, perceptual, cognitive, and emotional habits (sankhāra); and craving forms of desire (tanhā).