Becoming decent and nice Buddhist nihilists

I don’t think the West knows exactly how to deal with nihilism or will even acknowledge that it is here and growing. Nevertheless, it is present in such forms as political nihilism (Neo-Marxism) and moral nihilism which rejects the constraints of a moral life, and in some cases, turns into a kind of celebration of degeneracy and sociopathy in the example of the young black gangsta types in Chicago.

Then there is the problem of epistemological nihilism in which there is supposedly no ultimate truth or true nature that lies buried within us hidden by our deep attachment to this impermanent and insubstantial world.  All is empty, in other words.  We’re just biological machines.   Meaning, too, is empty.  At best there is relativism.  There can be many different interpretations of a novel or even the Buddha’s words.  There is not one correct meaning—there are many.

All this tends to add up to the belief that life, fundamentally, has little or no meaning.  This is existential nihilism.  More and more people, as they grow older, seem more and more faced with the likelihood that life, in the final analysis, is absurd.  Some have already accepted the judgment that life is absurd and meaningless.  Some even find their way to Buddhism believing that Buddhism is teaching mankind that in the face of nihilism—the total emptiness of it all—we have to learn to be good nihilists! 

I see this acceptance of nihilism in some elements of Theravada Buddhism and even in Stephen Batchelor’s interpretation of Buddhism which he presented in his book, Buddhism Without Beliefs.  Batchelor’s Buddhism is according to him, “existential, therapeutic, and liberating agnosticism.” But his book hasn’t escaped the call of nihilism. 

Using Buddhism, Batchelor invented a Buddhist oriented, romanticized version of nihilism, one especially made for the modern world where most agree that life is absurd but faced with this, we just need to learn to be decent and nice Buddhist nihilists and do a lot of meditation.  We can still have a family, a nice home and a big nice SUV and even go to Disney World.  Of course I am being facetious because the Buddha abhorred nihilism as much as he abhorred the belief that the conditioned world was the true world.  Rather he taught that our very self (pratyātman) can realize nirvana which is unconditioned and immortal.

 

 

Comments

[smith]

jung/zennist: lol.. wow seconded!! ,, a fancy version of the old 'put a hose in the tail pipe and get into the car windows closed' of yester-years!! lol. the clarity of the insanity and the attendant evil which underlies it is daily evermore apparent. when the lie becomes the 'good' and the truth becomes the 'bad', such are the manifestations.

[thezennist]

Jung: Wow! What a way to go. Nihilism perfected. Too much pain, times are rough, debt too much, well, you can check out early. Release liquid nitrogen—goodbye cruel world!

[Jung]

You make a good case.

Articles like the one below do certainly not contradict you.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-03/3d-printed-suicide-machines-will-usher-silent-genocide