 Dasti writes that for Nyāya, agency is a special expression of the self’s different capacities and potentialities, which coherently ties together all its distinctive characteristics (2013, 114). Dasti is right to emphasise that the Nyāya self is much more than a subject of experience, that it is more importantly an agent – a doer and a knower. But Dasti and others in contemporary literature fail to emphasise that the distinctive qualities (viśeṣa) of the self, desire, cognition, pain, etc., are transitory and come into existence only when the self is in contact with the mind-sense organs-body complex. The substance-quality distinction which is the hallmark of Nyāya ontology, and an important tool that accounts for all the goods afforded by the Nyāya postulation of the self as distinct substance. As Dasti puts it: