Why did South Asian authors of the past undertake to write philosophical treatises? Many claimed that what drove them was first and foremost a desire to help others. Yet the influential Pramāṇavārttika by the great Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (c. 600 CE) begins with a verse that has been read by all modern historians as declaring that, since most people are incapable of understanding his thought and filled with resentment towards the intellectually brillant, he is not writing at all so as to help others, but simply to fulfill his personal passion for beautiful philosophical discourses. It is striking, however, that the oldest preserved commentaries on the text, Śākyabuddhi’s and Karṇakagomin’s, have a very different perspective on this stanza – one that has been almost completely overlooked by modern scholarship so far. Śākyabuddhi and Karṇakagomin both offer two alternative interpretations. According to the first, Dharmakīrti, while apparently claiming to be egoistic, in fact had as his goal to help others, and the stanza must be read as indirectly expressing an altruistic meaning; according to the second, which offers a completely different (and unlikely) way of construing the stanza, the latter literally states that Dharmakīrti’s sole motives are altruism and compassion. The article provides an edition and English translation of the relevant passages in the commentaries; it also discusses the strategies employed by Buddhist commentators to salvage Dharmakīrti from accusations of egoism, as well as the perspective of non-Buddhist authors on Dharmakīrti’s motives.