It is now well understood that during the first few centuries following the Arab conquest of Central Asia the interaction of Muslims and Buddhists was imbued with respect, curiosity, and a likely zeal for, among other things, scholastic collaboration. One of the more self-evident cases in which Buddhist and Islamic scholars likely collaborated concerns the formation of the Islamic doctrine of occasionalism, which arose after the ‘Abbāsid Revolution and bears a remarkable resemblance to the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. Recent scholarship already suggests that the early Islamic doctrines of atomism were originally inspired by Central Asian Buddhist philosophers in Khurāsān (esp. at scholastic centers such as Balkh) and by the Barmakid viziers in the new ‘Abbāsid court rather than by the transmission of Greek philosophy as long theorized though ultimately untenable. Much attention has been given to the atomism and occasionalism of al-Ash‘arī (874-936), but to date there has been much less scholarship on the ontology of al-Māturīdī of Samarkand (853-944) and the intriguing possibility that al-Māturīdī likewise promoted a form of occasionalism. Whether or not al-Māturīdī’s ontology included a strict atomism as the later Māturīdī theologian Abū l-Mu‘īn al-Nasafī (d. 1114) ascribes to him, the occasionalism of both al-Ash‘arī and al-Māturīdī, including the ontological commitments of each form of occasionalism, can be shown to have developed directly from the core Buddhist doctrine of momentariness and its own atomistic underpinnings. Furthermore, a brief outline of the geographical distribution of competing Buddhist theories of momentariness will elucidate the differences found in the Ash‘arī and Māturīdī ontologies, which developed to a significant degree independently of each other according to regional Buddhist scholastic influences: al-Ash‘arī in Baṣra and Baghdād benefited from the Central Asian scholarship handed down from the Barmakid viziers a century earlier, while al-Māturīdī’s lineage in Transoxiana and northeast Khurāsān benefited from the persistence of Buddhist scholarship there. As such, differences between the two ontologies can be accounted for by the intellectual history of Buddhism and early Islamic Theology while also reinforcing our present understanding of the persistence of Buddhist scholastic thought in Central Asia and the ‘Abbāsid capital. In this presentation, I will briefly summarize the early intellectual history of Buddhist and Muslim scholastic collaboration in Central Asia and then focus on the soteriological goals of al-Māturīdī’s integration of early-medieval Buddhist conceptions of momentariness into his ontology, which was arguably occasionalist.