Egoless

 With your perfect intelligence and compassion, which are beyond all limit, you comprehend the ego-less-ness of things and persons, and are free and clear from the hindrances of passion and learning and egoism.

Gautama, Buddha. THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA (p. 3). Independent. Kindle Edition. 

"Ego" has become a catch-word in psychology. I do recall learning about ego based psychology as an undergraduate student (see Heinz Kohut, for instance), who linked the development of ego to the proper empathy that a child can receive from caregivers. It may seem surprising, therefore, for Westerners to learn that Buddhism stresses the "ego-less-ness" of things and persons, meaning that there is no ego inside things or people. I suppose this can be taken in different ways, but maybe what the Buddha is trying to convey is that the ego is only a mental construct that we habitually form around ourselves and people around us. Once we do become locked into a strong sense of ego, it may be hard to realize that people are actually an amalgamation of many moving forces, and there isn't once cohesive "person" in all of it after all.

Ego is not just about being attached to one's own self. In fact, in the context of this passage, it seems that even "things" can be endowed with a sense of ego, such as when we assume that a precious or loved object has permanent qualities or characteristics. We even endow "human" qualities onto non-human objects, so this also adds to the idea that ego is a construct.

How does one build a sense of ego? Passion, for one, is being attached to certain things and repelling others. But it surprises me that "learning" would also be said to be a hindrance to ego. Why "learning", you may wonder? I think because learning often creates a sense of "I have learned or heard this already" which blocks us from directly experiencing things, which strengthens a conceptual understanding of self as opposed to a direct awareness of its impermanence.