 Another issue Nāgārjuna raises (in MMK 9:3) concerns the epistemic status of the self. A tension arises once we note that in its role as a unifier of our cognitive life a substantial self features in all our experiences, as the subject having the experiences, but at the same time, given the distinctness of such a self from our body and all parts of our mental life it must also be distinct from all experiences. In order to have epistemic access to our self it must be able to function as a cognitive object. Since we assume, however, that it is not only a cognitive subject but also intrinsically a cognitive object it cannot ever occupy this role — at least if we make the plausible assumption that being an object and being a subject are mutually incompatible properties. Now given that we do not seem to be able to acquire knowledge of the self by introspection or by observation of the outside world it appears that the only cognitive route left open to us is inference. We have to establish by an argument that the self exists. It might strike us as slightly curious that what seems to be the most intimate object of our acquaintance has to be known by a most indirect route. We might also consider it as somewhat epistemically implausible to assume that everybody’s belief in a self is arrived at by a process of drawing inferences from a set of clues. One Nyāya argument for the existence of the self based on the supposed existential dependence of qualities on a substratum has already been discussed above. The Mādhyamika will be reluctant to accept it since he does not agree with the Nyāya ontology of individuals and properties it presupposes. Other arguments would obviously have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But the Mādhyamika will argue here that in fact no such argument is needed, since it is perfectly possible to account for our self-awareness, as long as we give up the conception of a substantial self. If we conceive of the self as a temporally stretched-out compound of psychophysical events then there is no fundamental difficulty that the same type of event turns up on the cognizing subject side on one occasion, and on the cognized object side on another. Given that there is no unified substratum constituting the self there is also no necessity for something to be essentially a subject of experience. As different parts can play different roles at different times our self-knowledge can be just explained by a momentary identification with a mental event that presently functions as a cognizing subject.