 The Dignāga-Dharmakīrti school—contrary to certain globally anti-realist Buddhist schools like the Madhyamaka—recognizes that there are, indeed must be, some entities that are fully real. It is, however, a school that is thoroughly nominalist. What is real for them is only the particular (svalakṣaṇa). By contrast, anything that is a universal (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) is unreal; at most it is a customarily recognized fiction needed for thought and language. What demarcates the real from the fictional is that the former has causal powers and exists in a purely punctual way, a new entity each moment. Both Dignāga and Dharmakīrti were, in their final positions, followers of the Yogācāra idealism, although they clearly went to great effort to make their positions largely acceptable to proponents of external objects and to idealists alike. Indeed in Dharmakīrti’s case, most of his philosophy is presented from a point of view in which external objects (bāhyārtha) are (provisionally at least) accepted as real. Idealism only enters the picture after verse 194 of the third chapter of Pramāṇavārttika. He certainly does have sophisticated arguments to prove idealism, that is, the view for him that there are no external objects, that “everything cognizable is internal” (antarjñeyavāda), “only mere data” (vijñaptimātra),  [5]  and that subject (grāhaka) and object (grāhya) are not two distinct entities. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main thrust of Dharmakīrti’s metaphysics—his nominalism, his proofs of impermanence and his causal theories of properties—is largely unaffected by the choice of external realism or idealism. Similarly for his epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, with a few adjustments here and there. Even on matters of solipsism and other minds, the choice of idealism makes little difference for Dharmakīrti. In the Saṃtānāntarasiddhi, for example, he goes to great length to show that the Yogācāra idealist can use the same arguments for other minds–i.e., the argument from analogy—as the Sautrāntika realist, and just as the realist can avoid solipsism so the idealist supposedly can  too.[6]  For our purposes, essentially for simplicity and conciseness, we shall treat of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy as accepting external objects, with the proviso that most of the same ideas can be reinterpreted to conform to idealism. Another way to put it is that we’ll read the Pramāṇavārttika along the broad lines of what Tibetan siddhānta (grub mtha’) literature terms the “position common to Sautrāntika [external realism] and Cittamātra [idealism]” (mdo sde pa dang sems tsam pa thun mong ba’i lugs).