 Dharmakīrti has two arguments for the momentariness (kṣaṇikatva) of all that exists, one quite obscure and unconvincing, which he inherited from previous writers like Vasubandhu (5 century C.E.), and the other more  promising.[14]  The first argument, which nowadays is commonly known as the vināśitvānumāna, or “the inference of things perishing [spontaneously],” turns on the long-attested Buddhist idea that perishing must be of the intrinsic nature of any object. Perishing due to its intrinsic nature, something will always perish as soon it  exists.[15]  The point is that such moment by moment destruction is spontaneous (ākasmika) and is the uncaused real nature of things, because it cannot be an effect of any cause. The effect of such a cause, i.e., the absence of the entity, would have to be a type of non-being (abhāva), and non-being is unreal.