  In the Commentary on Valid Cognition (PV III, 194-–224) Dharmakīrti’s addresses the issue of whether perception, as a source of knowledge, apprehends distinct spatio-temporal entities as aggregated wholes or aggregation is a conceptual construct and thus outside the domain of perceptual awareness. Neither of these positions is acceptable, for Dharmakīrti, as is well known, follows Dignāga in admiting only direct, non-conceptual types of cognitive awareness under the rubric of perception: thus, wholes, that is, entities composed or distributed over their parts, cannot be perceptually apprehended. Commenting on this aspect of Dharmakīrti's philosophy of perception, Dunne (2004, 102) thinks that in rejecting these two positions, Dharmakīrti effectively undermines his antirealist critique of the notion that perception can apprehend real aggregated objects. In response to the objections of his realist (chiefly the Naiyāyika) opponent that by admitting that perception has the capacity to apprehend aggregates as unitary wholes he is thus forced to admit that universals too are perceptible, Dharmakīrti replies that “aggregation” does not refer to the particular proper. Rather, it refers to a configuration of particles such that it can causally support the arising of a perceptual image without that image being in any way related to the external aggregated object that supervenes on those particles (see discussion of this issue in Dunne 2004, 103 and passim).