  An axiomatic principle of all Madhyamaka philosophy, following  Nāgārjuna's Foundation of the Middle Way, is that  all things, including all cognitive episodes, by virtue of being the  product of cause and conditions, lack inherent existence  (svabhāva) and are thus empty  (śūnya). That is, nothing truly exits on its own,  and no entity or mental state has its characteristics intrinsically.  Candrakīrti's critique of reflexive awareness, then, targets  this notion that there is a class of cognitive events that are  essentially self-characterizing: they reveal their own content  without recourse to an additional instance of cognitive awareness.  More specifically, Candrakīrti rejects the notion that reflexive awareness has this unique property of giving access to the pure datum of experience (as Tillemans (1990: 49, n.109) observes,  Candrakīrti does not seem to want to concede that there is a  difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as,’  and rests his criticism of reflexivity on the notion that all seeing  is in effect seeing as).