 The debate with Brahmanical schools on specific doctrinal questions naturally moved to long and involved discussions on issues of scriptural authority, such as the Mīmāṃsaka school’s justification of the Vedas as being eternal, uncreated by humans (apauruṣeya) and hence authoritative because free from any human influence. (The Buddhist retort is essentially that if per impossibile scriptures were uncreated, they would be incomprehensible, for there would be no speakers’ intentions to mean one thing rather than another in using a specific word.) On the role of scripture Dharmakīrti actually had a nuanced position. In Pramāṇavārttika I.213–217 et sq. and in IV.48–108 he maintains that scripture shouldn’t be used on factual or rationally decidable matters; perception and logical reasoning trump the scriptures of one’s own school; one is not to be faulted for rejecting one’s school’s scriptures when reason dictates it; on rationally undecidable matters, however, that is on so-called “radically inaccessible things” (atyantaparokṣa), like the specific details of the law of karman (exactly what actions in past lives lead to what results in the future?), scriptural accounts need to be relied upon because of the absence of any other means (agatyā) (I.216). Scripture, if it passes certain conditions, can be designated as being an inferential source of knowledge, but is always fallible and not to be considered a full-fledged source of knowledge, as “it has no claim to certainty” (nāto niścayaḥ), unlike bona fide inferences (Svavṛtti ad I.318). The eighth century commentator Śākyabuddhi summarizes things interestingly in his commentary to I.216: scripture is simply needed by (indeed, indispensable to) those who wish to set out upon the spiritual path (pravṛttikāma), but it is not grounded in any objective facts (vastutas) (Tillemans 1999, ch. 2).