 It is extremely important to keep these levels apart, in order to prevent Vasubandhu from committing an evident self-contradiction. At the end of his commentary to verse 10 of the Twenty Verses, Vasubandhu imagines an interlocutor challenging the appearance-only view by saying that if no dharmas exist at all, then so also appearance-only doesn’t exist. How, then, can it be established? This charge of self-referential incoherence is faced by anti-realists of all stripes, and it is familiar to Buddhist philosophers from Nāgārjuna’s Vīgrahavyāvartanī. (See the entry on  Nāgārjuna  in this encyclopedia.) Vasubandhu’s reply in the Twenty Verses Commentary is that appearance-only does not mean the nonexistence of dharmas. It only means the absence of a nature (svabhāva) that is falsely attributed to a constructed self (kalpitātmanā), and Vasubandhu is quick to say that when one establishes appearance-only, appearance-only must also be understood to be itself a construction, without a self. Otherwise, there would be something other than an appearance, which would by definition contradict appearance-only. All there is, is appearance, and everything that appears is a false construction of self.