When some Western Buddhists encounter discourses (Suttas/Sutras) which contain the via negativa, their unconscious predisposition towards nihilism takes over. They even refuse to admit that certain Buddhist discourses are sun-lit with the via negativa in which one sheds the conditioned to reach the unconditioned, i.e., nirvana. Instead, for them there is only the conditioned not-self (i.e., the Five Aggregates); nothing beyond it; no other shore beyond the dismal ocean of samsara.
So laden with nihilism are some Western Buddhists that they are unable to grasp anything the Buddha said, especially with regard to the self. The only self such a person accepts is a provisional, temporal self which arises with the conditioned psychophysical body; then with its dissolution is no more. This person regards his psychophysical body, which is impermanent, suffering and without a self to be all that there is. This is really where many Western Buddhists are.
Turning to nirvana which in the canon is described as being eternal (accutam), the immortal (amata), transphenomenal (appapañca), beyond thought (acinteyya), etc. , Western Buddhists with a predisposition towards nihilism believe that nirvana is not experienceable insofar as it it a non-ens; moreover, an absence. Such Buddhists are not completely rejecting nirvana, just that it is not experienceable in which transcendence becomes a reality and fully realized.
It almost goes without saying, but nihilism is the psychological condition of materialism—and many modern Buddhists subscribe to materialism. People who are materialists only believe in their senses—nothing beyond them. It follows that they deny karma, the fruits of karma, cyclic existence and rebirth. In Buddhism, according to Asanga in his Abhidharmasamuccya, this is called “perverse view.”
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