For one thing, it is a habit of mind. It is a habit of mind through which, basically, any sensory experience (and, for the Buddha, thinking was a sixth sensory experience) is added to: one thing leads to another, and soon we believe that person's sniff was a dismissal of our ideas. We're ready to fight. Here's how the Buddha put it:
If, monk, with regard to the cause whereby the perceptions & categories of complication assail a person, there is nothing there to relish, welcome, or remain fastened to, then that is the end of the obsessions of passion, the obsessions of resistance, the obsessions of views, the obsessions of uncertainty, the obsessions of conceit, the obsessions of passion for becoming, & the obsessions of ignorance. That is the end of taking up rods & bladed weapons, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech. That is where these evil, unskillful things cease without remainder.
According to the Sutta record, after uttering these somewhat obscure words, the Buddha then retired to his quarters, leaving many of his disciples scratching their heads. So they asked a senior monk who was good at explication what it was the Buddha meant. That monk, Venerable Maha Kaccana, explains the chain of reactions that lead to complications, or "papancizing." He begins with the eye and moves through all the sense doors, ending with thought:
Dependent on eye & forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as a requisite condition, there is feeling. What one feels, one perceives (labels in the mind). What one perceives, one thinks about. What one thinks about, one complicates. Based on what a person complicates, the perceptions & categories of complication assail him/her with regard to past, present, & future forms cognizable via the eye.
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