Anyone knows where the buddhist simile of the rope and the snake can be found?!?

Question

Suppose we are walking down the country road at night. We look down at the ground and suddenly we see a snake and become frightened. Then we turn our flashlight on it. We look again and we see that there is only a rope, no snake. The rope was there all along, never a snake, but the rope appeared to us to be a snake because our sight was obscured by the darkness, because we did not focus our light on it. As a result of seeing a snake we became filled with fear and worry. When we found that it was only a rope, the appearance of the snake dissolved. We can compare the snake to the idea of self or ego, the flashlight to wisdom, and the rope to the complex of five aggregates.

Answer 1

I agree with your description, you seem to have answered your own question, so whats the beef? What the heck I still get two points.

Answer 2

The Four Noble Truths are divided into two groups, two of them to be abandoned, and two of them to be gained - the truth of suffering and the truth of the cause of suffering are to be abandoned, and the truth of the end of suffering and the truth of the path to the end of suffering are to be gained. Understanding the cause of suffering enables one to do this. We can see this clearly in the Buddha’s description of His experience on the night of His enlightenment. When He saw the cause of suffering, when He understood that desire, ill-will and ignorance were the causes of suffering, this opened the door to His enlightenment. Ignorance, desire and ill-will are the causes of suffering. If we want to reduce our examination to the most essential concept, we must focus upon ignorance because it is due to ignorance that desire and ill-will arise.

Essentially, ignorance is the idea of a permanent, independent self. It is this conception of an "I" opposed and separate from the people and things around us. Once we have the notion of an "I", we have an inclination to favour those things that sustain this "I" and to be averse to those things that we think threaten this "I". It is this conception of the self that is the fundamental cause of suffering, the root of the various negative emotions - desire, anger, ill-will, envy, greed and jealousy. It is ignorant of the fact that the so-called "I", the self, is just a convenient name for a collection of ever-changing, dependent, contingent factors. Is there a forest apart from the trees? The self is just a convenient name for a collection of processes. The self is a cause of suffering and fear. In this context the self is likened to mistaking a rope for a snake in the semi-darkness. If we come upon a rope in the darkness, we may assume the rope is in fact a snake and this assumption is a cause of fear. Similarly, in ignorance we take the impersonal, impermanent processes of feelings, perceptions, and so forth to be a self, and as a result we respond to situations with hope and fear. We desire certain things, we are averse to others. We are fond of certain people, we dislike others. So ignorance in this sense is the mistaken notion of a permanent ego, of a real self.

Answer 3

We observe such acts in life due to fear in our minds,another example is doubting a bush for ghost or some wild animal in partial darkness. That kind of fears are supposed to be due to thin veils between our souls and the supreme soul and can be reduced or eliminated by practising meditation/prayer

Answer 4

I believe they first showed up in Adi Shankara's commentaries.

Here's a couple links if you want to know more.