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natural reading, if we expect vipaksa in the third characteristic and if we can identify anumeya and tattulya with paksa and sapakșa, for the universe of discourse in Dignāga's logic is divided into three parts, namely, pakșa, sapakșa and vipaksa.
Oetke, on the other hand, seems to opt for anumeya as the logical subject of the phrase asati and says (p. 65):
Perhaps ... the author of the PS invited the reader to take the word anumeya in two different senses for the interpretation of the verse, first in the sense of 'substratum of the property to be proven' at the beginning of the kārikā and later in the sense of 'property to be proven' for the supplementation of the logical subject of the existence-predicate represented by asati.
Now I would like to support the above interpretation of Oetke as one of the possible meanings of the third characteristic. But his second alternative, to take anumeya (in the first characteristic) in the sense of 'property to be proven', is contradicted by Dignāga's own comment, viz. dharmaviśisto dharmy anumeyaḥ. First I would like to show that Dignāga possibly assigned not two but three meanings to the word anumeya.
2. 3. 1. The meaning of the term anumeya
When we read Dignāga's texts on logic, we must be careful to distinguish different meanings attributed to the same technical term and to identify different terms which are meant to express the same or similar logical concepts. For example, in NMukh (Taisho p. 1b) Dignāga attributes three distinct meanings to the word paksa ), namely, (1) a proposition consisting of the topic / property-possessor dharmin ( ) and the property to be proven dharma (£) (e.g. "The mountain possesses a fire"), (2) the property-possessor as the topic of the proposition (e.g. the mountain), and (3) the property to be proven (e.g. a fire).
