 Śāntarakṣita was a towering figure in eighth century Indian philosophy. It appears from the little evidence we have that he was fully engaged in the philosophical arena of his day including the composition of polemical tracts against his rivals. We can assume that these were taken seriously by his opponents because some of his extant writings are only known today because they were preserved in Jain libraries. But Śāntarakṣita’s philosophical style was richer than simple polemics. In texts like MA, he led his readers through a dynamic engagement with competing views. Competing views, particularly competing Buddhist philosophical views were utilized in his texts in ways that encouraged his readers to contemplate the full impact and import of those views. In other words, he seems to encourage a provisional acceptance of competing Buddhist views as he presents a philosophical hierarchy of tenets. This method makes for a quite dynamic engagement with those competing views where provisionally taking on the competing views serves to have a transformative affect on the mind of the student as they ascend the philosophical hierarchy. They were not simply used as vehicles for illuminating his own view by contrasting it with those of his Buddhist rivals, though he was certainly doing that as well. Śāntarakṣita was doing more than that; he was encouraging his readers to take on those philosophical tenet systems he considered to be hierarchically “lower” in order to facilitate what seems to be a dynamic philosophical enterprise of multi-tiered engagement with a host of philosophical positions and views. In a tradition where philosophical inquiry is a form of religious praxis, it appears that provisional acceptance of the tenets of lower schools was used to ripen the mind for increasingly more subtle and accurate philosophical descriptions of reality. In other words, since the cultivation of experiential wisdom knowing reality is at the heart of what facilitates the larger tradition’s soteriological goals, this dynamic method can be said to serve soteriological  aims.[13]