Every other major world creed belonged to a tradition that argues about the nature of God: Christian councils over the being of the Son, Jewish liturgy over the oneness proclaimed in the Shema, Islamic testimony over the sole reality of God, Zoroastrian confession over which power one professes to worship. Buddhism has traditionally been the loud exception, a religion the comparative literature calls non-theistic and sometimes describes as having no creed at all.
The tisarana complicates that description without erasing it. It functions exactly where a creed functions, as the fixed form that marks entry and that a whole tradition recites in common, but it does so by orientation rather than assertion, which is why its inclusion here is a functional argument and not a claim that Buddhism has quietly grown a theology to match its Abrahamic neighbours. Two related formulas mark the edges of that claim rather than its centre.
The Pure Land Refuge Aspiration is a devotional elaboration specific to one Mahayana school, naming Amitabha and the wish for rebirth in his Pure Land, a different act built on the same grammar of refuge. The Daoist Three Refuges borrows the threefold shape itself, refuge in the Tao, the scriptures and the teachers, a structural loan into a different religion entirely rather than a variant of the Buddhist formula. The tisarana is the reference case those other two depart from, and the one on which the Sangha at large actually agrees.