One day a man asked Buddha, "What is ignorance? You have spoken so often about it; can you illustrate it, can you explain it?" Buddha said, "There was a man who was clinging to the branch of a tree on a very dark night. All night he clung to that branch, and in the morning he saw that the ground was only one foot beneath his feet. And all the fear and anguish and torture he had felt throughout the whole night vanished with the breaking of dawn.'