This strong reading was reinforced in China by indigenous Confucian and Daoist conceptions of a thing’s nature (xing, 性) as dispositional and of the world as an auto-poetic or self-creating (ziran, 自然) system of continually-evolving relational patterns (dao, 道)—not a divine creation, an objective determinant of universal physical laws, or a material expression of transcendent principles. These indigenous Chinese conceptions of reality resonated well with Buddhist notions of interdependence and impermanence. But Buddhism added to them the teaching of karma, directing attention to the dramatic character of phenomenal reality.