 This is a surprisingly fallibilist and pragmatic position for a deeply religious thinker. Taken further, it would have major consequences for Buddhist ethics. The use of appeals to “radically inaccessible” facts to justify ethical positions was recognized by Dharmakīrti to be flawed in public debate. Indeed he seems to have been quite aware that invoking such purely scriptural positions would fall flat outside the context of convinced  Buddhists.[55]  The lesson could have been that Buddhists should genuinely privilege rational considerations debatable by all, rather than heavily weighting “proofs” that were for the faithful. Unfortunately, however, over history the later Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholastic apologists transformed the Dharmakīrtian view on scripture, indeed all of his religious philosophy, into an increasingly rigid  edifice.[56]  Dharmakīrti became the defender of the Buddhist faith—the “lord of reasoning” (Tib. rigs pa’i dbang phyug). It is regrettable that much of the thought of this highly inquisitive and subtle philosopher often became, in later Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, a series of unquestioned formulae to secure Buddhist fundamentalism.