 Buddhism, with a millennium of philosophical roots going back to India and further cultivated in China and Korea, brought to Proto-Shintō’s vague intuitions and inchoate belief systems sophisticated analyses, multiple theoretical formulations and counterarguments represented by a multitude of different schools of thought, and a rich new vocabulary redolent with allusions to ideas and terms from Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese. There were, however, a few nearly universally accepted Buddhist themes that resonated well with the Japanese preliterate context and have continued to influence major lines of Japanese thinking throughout its history