 The whys and wherefores of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy of religion are no doubt partly explained by the historical context in which he lived, one in which Buddhist institutions and power were confronted with forceful challenges of a reinvigorated  Brahmanism.[54]  Indeed, not just on matters of Buddhist doctrine but also on many metaphysical issues was there a religious dimension to his arguments. In the latter half of the first chapter of Pramāṇavārttika, Dharmakīrti proceeds to a detailed attack on the authority of the Vedas, the Brahmins that expound them, the Brahmanical ideas about the efficacy of mantras, and the system of caste (see Eltschinger 2000). It is noteworthy that a frequent Sanskrit term for “universal”, “kind”, i.e., jāti, is also the term for “caste.” As Eltschinger (2000) shows, the discussions on the unreality of universals and the unreality of caste were related for Dharmakīrti and were explicitly taken to be related by commentators like Śākyabuddhi and Karṇakagomin. Castes were natural kinds explainable through universals for non-Buddhists, and they were not arbitrary or man-made customary distinctions. An obvious pay-off of Dharmakīrti’s nominalism, then, was that Buddhists could further distance themselves from Brahmanical principles of social organization and ethics by attacking the metaphysical foundations of caste.