  In his Tarkajvālā, in which Bhāvaviveka is freed from the constraints of following Nāgārjuna’s texts and puts forward his own approach to Madhyamaka, he states that the term “highest goal” (paramārtha-satya) has two aspects. One aspect is that it is free from volitional thought, pure and beyond the reach of verbal elaborations. Another aspect is that it is volitional in nature, connected with the accumulation of knowledge and meritorious karma, and connected with verbal elaborations and with the transactional knowledge of everyday life. By seeing the ultimate goal in this way, Bhāvaviveka claims to give an account that leaves reality intact as a uniform whole about which knowledge can be diverse and incremental. This incremental nature of knowledge makes ample room for the traditional Mahāyāna teachings of the gradated bodhisattva path whereby one moves from the aspiration for enlightenment to the gradual realization of enlightenment. A metaphor that Bhāvaviveka uses for the Buddhist path is that it follows verbal teachings which are like a ladder that one slowly ascends until one can climb over the wall into non-conceptual direct awareness of the peaceful reality of nirvana in which there is nothing to be wished for, nothing to be understood and no hypothesis to be defended.