 For Dignāga (and his successors) this split between perception and conceptual thought was part and parcel of a type of foundationalism. Perception is directly causally bound to particulars and “fixed” (niyata) by them: its internal representation (ākāra) of the object is causally determined by, and corresponds to, the particular itself. It is for that reason that perception is the fundamental “contact” with the world upon which the superstructure of conceptual cognition rests; conceptual cognition, on the other hand, is not fixed in this way by particulars and can to a large degree think what it will about whatever it chooses. The separation between perception and conceptual thinking in Pramāṇasamuccaya is thus radical indeed and yields what seems to be a counterintuitive consequence. For Dignāga it would seem that one and the same object could never be both perceived and thought about. Non-Buddhist thinkers, such as Naiyāyikas and Mīmāṃsakas, did not have this problem. They could cheerfully allow that when one person sees a vase and another thinks about it, the type of understanding may be different but the object is the same in that the conceptual thought grasps a real universal vaseness that inheres in the same particular vase that is perceived. But Dignāga could not go that route as a nominalist. For him if the object of thought is vaseness, that object is unreal and thus quite different from the real particular vases that one sees.