 At the heart of Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s philosophies is the principle that particulars, i.e., what is real, are only properly grasped by perception; the way they are in themselves is thus said to be “ineffable” (avyapadeśya; Tib. bstan bya min), “not an object of words”  (śabdasyāviṣaya).[34]  Now, obviously, we do in some way manage to talk about particulars—otherwise language would be useless in daily life. But why then say that language and thought fail to capture them? The answer is twofold. First of all, grammatical elements, like subject and predicate, qualifier and qualificand, agent and action, etc., have no corresponding ontological features, as particulars are unities admitting no distinctions between possessors of properties (dharmin) and properties (dharma). Dharmakīrti puts the point as follows in Pramāṇavārttika I.61: