 The second part (b) of Śāntarakṣita’s argument, that love and hatred are different from perception, is intriguing in that he claims that there cannot be an external cause for love and hatred because whatever we might want to postulate as this external object can elicit different feelings in different people. The object of one person’s love might be the object of another person’s aversion. For this reason, love and hatred cannot be acquired in this life, like perceptions. So the love and hatred that exist in a baby or young animal must be carried over from another life. This argument assumes that there could not be non-perceptual cognition that can arise without previous experience and therefore faces the same challenges as the claim that all feelings have to be learned through repeated experience. But it goes beyond this discussion in that it raises the question of what the object of love and hatred is. Kamalaśīla uses the term vaśa (desire, love) rather than rāga in his commentary on TS 1948–1953 which suggests that he does not clearly distinguish between desire and love. If it is true that rāga is a kleśa then it is plausible that there is no distinction between love and craving. So he could be making the obvious point that we can desire something without a basis in the external world, i.e., what I desire might not exist, or that I might desire something for the wrong reasons. Love, hatred and desire all require the existence of an object. However, unlike a perceptual object, the objects of love and desire can be “merely” mental. I can love the idea of equality or I can desire something which does not exist. This “non-existence” can be two-fold: i) I can desire something which cannot exist either logically or physically, for example, I can desire that I had wings; ii) if I desire something to be the case, then what I desire does not exist, yet. For example, if I desire an ice-cream then the state of affairs in which I have an ice-cream does not exist, yet. In contrast with love and desire, perception, at least on a realist account, requires its object to exist in the external world.