 Why are they “quasi” and not full-fledged universals? The reasoning is not explicit in Dignāga. However, it can be plausibly reconstructed. Buddhist Epistemologists generally subscribed to the principle that mere absences of properties are of a lesser ontological status than positive things. They would stress that negative facts, like x not being blue, heavy, etc., are constituted by our mere interests (i.e., we seek a blue thing at such and such a location and come away empty-handed), and are less real than the fact that x causes perceptions of blue, a fact which is what it is objectively and independently of interests. It seems that it is this general Buddhist intuition of the unreality of absences upon which Dignāga relied. As the “exclusion of what is other” is itself only a negative property/absence of something rather than a presence, we are spared commitment to there being real universals in addition to real particulars.