 In the fourteenth and fifteenth century Shintō philosophers in the Watarai lineage had started to pose repeatedly a new argument: historical priority entails ontological priority or importance. For a creation or cosmogonic theory formulated in diachronic time, the point is clear enough. What comes first creates what comes next and hence the latter is ontologically dependent on the former. The remarkable point is that this claim, so common in Abrahamic theories of genesis as well as most classical Greco-Roman cosmogonies, seems to have been mostly unargued in Japan before the medieval period, primarily because Buddhism and Confucianism place little importance in their philosophies on creation myths. Buddhism in particular favors a cyclical rather than linear theory of cosmic time and, therefore, in claiming the ontological superiority of buddhas over their manifestations as kami, the argument was based on a metaphysical or logical argument, not an appeal to a chronology of creation.