Nihilism ain't Buddhism

I am always trying to find words to describe nihilism the way it should be defined, trying to use just a few words.  Lately, I have decided to define nihilism as the belief that man is only the sum of his anatomy or if you prefer, the sum of his body parts.  When those parts cease working, that’s it.  Beyond that, life has no real meaning.

From this we can say that anyone who comes to study Buddhism or Zen Buddhism holding the belief that we, as human beings, are no more than the sum of our body parts can never enter the sacred stream of Buddhism or Zen.  They are forever banned, in other words.  And I think this is fitting for they deserve the fruits of their belief. 

Those who see man in such a limited way (and I have met some) have unknowingly sentenced their own consciousness to the abyss; to facing the very wellspring of disharmony and suffering, being unable to pull back from their fall.  So why are people like this?  For example, why did Leon Trotsky say things like this?

“The only difference is that this tyranny will not come from the right, but from the left, and will not be white, but red, in the literal sense of that word, for we shall shed such streams of blood that all the losses of human lives in Capitalist wars will shrink and pale before them” (Aaron Simanovich, Memoirs, Paris, 1922, Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow, No. 6, 1991, p. 55).

I have no empathy with his words.  At the same time, nothing has changed all that much in the human race.  We still have people like this in our world who are just as diabolical; and we still have no idea why such people become like this except to speculate about it.  For all we know those who have the greatest influence over the world have always been absolutely evil; who seem to profit from keeping people in ignorance and conflict.

In this regard, Buddhism wants us to see what, exactly, makes us greater than the sum of our anatomy which will also reveal how our spiritual blindness has, in the past, deluded us opening up the door of evil.  In fact, if we awaken we shall see that those who embrace nihilism are evil.  To borrow a line from the Lankavatara Sutra such people are “not to be spoken to, for they are offenders of the Buddhist doctrines.”

Comments

[Adasatala]

Nihilists, and atheists for that matter, are like young brats who've perhaps been dropped on their heads as infants. Those who are set in such ways and remain impenetrable are practicing evil. The body is like a perk, at most. It's something fun to play with, like a sandbox with a swingset and stuff. But outside of the sandbox, or should I say prior to it, there is an infinite space encompassing it.