Beliefs are the deep saṃskāra of the cognitive mind — impressions so repeatedly reinforced that they function as transparent lenses through which all experience is filtered without examination. The Sutras identify avidyā (misknowing) as the root kleśa: not moral failing but the accumulated, unexamined beliefs about self and world that generate suffering. Belief change is not argument but a patient rewriting of the impressions that construct the known self.
Each step builds on the last.