Where these categories came from matters as much as what they claim, because nineteenth-century Western scholarship regularly sorted non-Western traditions into this vocabulary from outside, and got it wrong in instructive ways. Early European interpreters frequently described Theravada Buddhism as a form of atheistic materialism or nihilism, reading its silence on a creator god and its doctrine of non-self through categories built for European debates about God and matter. Buddhist scholars and later Western Buddhologists have argued at length that the description mistakes a soteriology aimed at the cessation of suffering for a metaphysical system it was never trying to be.
A comparable mismatch affects Advaita Vedanta's place in this scheme. Article one notes its frequent classification as idealism, but Advaita's own polemical literature distinguishes its position sharply from the Yogacara Buddhist idealism it argues against, holding that Brahman is not mind in the sense the West means by the word, and objecting to being folded into a category built from Berkeley and German idealism.
A further complication is "religious naturalism," a position some Unitarian Universalist, Reconstructionist Jewish and non-theistic Buddhist communities hold today: nature as the whole of reality, described with religious language of wonder, reverence and practice rather than atheism's usual connotation of disenchantment. It shows that metaphysical naturalism and organised religious life are not automatically opposed, which the older textbook opposition of religion against materialism did not anticipate.