Buddha I

Nothing in the world [i.e., that which we can normally experience] has an unchanging essence. [...] Buddha is not primarily concerned with what exists - in fact, he thinks that is a red herring - but with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. For his purposes, what exists and the contents of experience are the same. At this level, if we want a label, his doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism.

in this view of the world, to ‘exist’ is not to change: existence and becoming are defined as opposites. But is change random? Surely not. Even if we and everything around us change all the time, life could not go on if we did not recognize continuities at every step. The change, in other words, is not random. The Buddha axiomatized this in the proposition that nothing exists without a cause. Another, simpler way of saying that all phenomena exhibit nonrandom change is to say that everything is process. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009