 The Treasury is staunchly anti-realist about both cognitive and linguistic objects. Nominalism and pragmatism are hardly outside the range of expectation for a Buddhist. Yet Tibetans both before and after Sapaṇ (esp. Chapa before, Tsongkhapa after) have tended to hew to a more intuitive and “moderate” realism—to use Georges Dreyfus’ terminology (1997). Sapaṇ defends a position that is more spare and more severe than most Tibetan epistemologists, and, according to modern scholarship, closer to  Dharmakīrti.[4]  Buddhist traditions are widely known for their insistence that ordinary beings are uniformly deluded and reality seen correctly by a Buddha is entirely beyond their (our) ken, so the counter-intuitive nature of anti-realism is not at all discomforting to the Indic Buddhist mainstream. Sapaṇ certainly considered his own views more accurate and more authentically Indian than those of his Tibetan adversaries. This self-understanding was, no doubt, buttressed by the fact that he had studied Sanskrit and Indian linguistic sciences with the followers of the Kashmiri scholar Śākyaśrībhadra and that with Śākyaśrī he had retranslated, and thereby rejuvenated the study of, Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika. Association with great Indian paṇḍitas gave Sapaṇ the confidence to distinguish his own conservative stance from ideas he disparagingly called “Tibetan” innovations.