 First is the Buddhist claim that reality consists of a flow of interdependent, conditioned events rather than independent, substantially existent things. Nothing exists in and of itself and there is no unchanging reality behind the world of flux. The Buddha’s view was formulated originally in opposition to an increasingly orthodox emphasis in Indian philosophy at the time (roughly the 5th c. bce) that favored the idea of a permanent reality (Sanskrit: brahman) or Self (ātman) behind a world of apparent change. Thus, more than a millennium later Buddhism came to Japan with fully developed, sophisticated analyses supporting a world view that was essentially consistent with proto-Shintō’s unreflective emphasis on internal relations, fluid boundaries, and a field of shifting events rather than fixed things. Moreover, within the variety of Buddhist schools introduced into Japan by the eighth century, there were further resources that could philosophically justify and elaborate what had been rather inchoate assumptions of pre-Buddhist Japan. For example, the Japanese Kegon (Chinese: Huayan) school had a rich philosophy of interdependence based in holographic relations, which had probably been more a magical modality than philosophical idea in the proto-Shintō consciousness. Kegon gave it a philosophical articulation and justification.