Pratyakṣa in Prāsaṅgika: how is sensory perception possible?

In the Buddhist Mahāyāna school Madhyamaka-Prāsaṅgika, the possibility of sense perception — one of the two (along with logical inference) instruments of cognition recognized in Buddhism — is under question. If all differences are false, being determined by ignorance that obscures saṃsāric consciousness, then perception appears, at first glance, to be impossible, since there is neither a perceiving subject nor a perceived object. Unlike the Yogācārins, the Prāsaṅgikas exclude the possibility of preverbal perception: it is always conceptually laden with the distinction between the subject and the object. However, in fact, perception is impossible only at the level of absolute reality, while at the level of relative reality it exists — but its object is not so much external objects as the fruits of a person’s karmically significant past actions, appearing as “external” objects. Therefore, the theory of perception in Prāsaṅgika must be viewed not through the prism of the correspondence theory, but through that of the coherence or pragmatic theories of truth.