Originally Posted by yaaarrrgg

But what's radically different in Buddhist thought, though, is there's not as much emphasis on believing one single thing. A Buddhist might say there are two correct ways to look at the picture, in that in one sense a river is a real entity, and in another sense it is not. That both ways of seeing it form the complete picture.

Personally, I prefer a more round-about way of speaking about an entity like an abstract conceptual model ... perhaps some elements of Buddhist thought have worn off on me. A (Platonic?) statement like "everything that exists has a specific nature" seems like it's saying that the thing exists first before the properties. But IMO, it's only because we group similar perceptions under a common model ... like a river.