First, maybe it would help if you would describe how you personally are defining nihilism in your own words, because there are several varieties, some of which are contradictory. While Buddhism does cover some of the same general territory, it’s purpose isn’t to address nihilism, so to discuss whether they agree or disagree, we have to be explicit about which sort of nihilism we are referring to.
“Well that’s not exactly correct. Meaninglessness is an anathema to action since much of what we do and enjoy is based entire on what we think or believe something to be. The meaning we assign to things is the reason why we do them, even if we choose not to admit to them. There is research to support this.”
The key here is the distinction between general meaning and personal meaning. You can say something has no intrinsic importance but still acknowledge that it is important to you. General meaninglessness is irrelevant to apathy. Personal meaning is sufficient for drive, but there are senses in which is is not necessary, at least not in the way we normally conceive of it.
The conventional model is, we desire something and then we consciously act to get it or avoid the opposite. But that model ignores a whole bunch of other modes of action. We breathe without needing to make it happen to prevent dying. Rivers flow without finding greater meaning in being downhill. One can act intuitively or just in accord with ones nature without bringing meaning or desire into it.
Action and non action are not a dichotomy, they are a continuum, and they necessarily incorporate each other. Non action can describe two different things, the disinclination to start or stop an action, or the inclination to stop an action. Even if one were to act purely passively, that wouldn’t prevent natural behavior from preexisting drives. There is a crucial difference between acceptance, apathy, and opposition.
Another way to look at it: the conventional working model of reality is that by acquiring external things, we get happy, and this is what drives our behavior. But in fact, if one honestly contemplates what is really happening, you can’t help but eventually notice that quite the opposite is true. The whole reason we aren’t happy in the first place is because we believe that acquisition is the basis of happiness. If we notice that actually, this striving causes us to suffer, and that by stopping this impulse, we stop suffering, we are just naturally happy, because that is our default state. And we don’t need to place special importance in external things to have drive, because happiness itself is a drive. Deep happiness inspires us to do things. We don’t need to seek happiness to have drive.
Obviously, not meeting our basic material needs would be distracting, and for this reason Buddha rejected ascetism specifically, and extremes generally, hence “the middle way”. Meeting material needs is not a contradiction though because it is not the action itself that matters as much as the way it is being done. Eating because you desire pleasure or fear starvation are different from eating simply because it is pragmatic and already being content let’s one enjoy and take delight in things in a more satisfying way than filling a desire does.
“Buddhism is faith based in that you are taking it on faith that what the buddha says is true. What I know is that believing something to be truth has the same effect on a person as that actually being true.”
That’s just silly. Buddhism is faith based only in the weakest most technical way, that believing the sun will rise is. Sure, there are remotely conceivable ways that completely unexpected things could happen, but they are improbable. Faith based means, trusting that something is true without even a reasonable chance that there can be evidence or replicated results. Buddhism only requires the same amount of faith as it takes to consider it possible that going to college for a specific degree has a fairly good chance of resulting in a career in that field.
And while the placebo effect is real, it has limits and primarily only affects personal physiology. You can’t stop the sun from rising by disbelief.
Could you conceivably stop suffering simply by adhering to a false belief? Possibly. But if that really was the only thing explaining why Buddhist methodology works, one would expect it to look a lot different. And it doesn’t pass a basic bullshit test. If you compare it to any other form of snake oil, it’s clearly in a different category. And it is fairly easy to test. The key reason we object to real faith based beliefs is because they aren’t disprovable.
I will grant you, some branches of Buddhism do explore more mystical notions, but none of these are really relevant to the core of Buddhism, they are more like electives, and there isn’t really a consensus on those parts anyway. They are more about reconciling whether particular cultural models of existence can be independently confirmed by the same experiential methods used to understand the nature of suffering. Objecting to that is sort of like saying we can’t take academics seriously because colleges also teach art.
" There is no bliss either, or enjoyment. To have either of these things left over is shown that the “self” is still recognized. As I have said the pleasure we get from things is based on what we project onto that. They still project but claim not to."
Are you claiming that happiness can only exist when we achieve specific goals? This seems contradictory. How do we know what to pursue unless we already have learned that we like it by experiencing it unintentionally first? Conventional happiness can be the result of discovery, not just intention. Also, part of the point of Buddhism is the discovery that real happiness is sort of just the default state. If you understand what causes suffering, you will remove the only obstacle to bliss.
There does seem to be some conflict between the two ideas of happiness being an extra thing, or it being what is left when you remove what it unnessecary. All I can say here is that there is ample evidence out there that more people who identify as deeply happy associate it with internal cultivation than external acquisition. There is certainly no shortage of misery and disfunction among materialists.
Bliss is not incompatible with no self for two reasons.
First, again, no self isn’t the total non existence of self (at least at all levels besides the abstract absolute) rather it is more about there not being a real distinction between subject and object. There is of course a sense in which talking about a branch is a useful conceit, but that’s all it is, if you look at the actual branch, you see that there is no meaningful place where the branch stops being the branch and starts being the tree, or vice versa.
Second, if you remove all distinctions between subject and object and experience what results, whatever that is, happens to phenomenonalogically be extremely similar to the sensation of bliss. However, strictly speaking, the sort of bliss we experience in the world view of subject object, and the sort we experience in no self, are not exactly the same, but they are related in a way similar to the branch and the treee. It is mostly a matter of degree of the extent of awareness.
“Again you are assuming pessimism.”
Maybe you can think of a better term. All I mean is that the “indifferent” aspect of nihilism is something that you claim is incompatible with happiness. And a little bit of a nod to the fact that some people seem to think nihilism leads to depression.
“If nothing matters then that leads to inaction.”
Again, distinction between inherent meaning and assigned meaning.
“Buddhism also doesn’t allow for personal meaning since that is just another form of illusion and self deception, or not seeing things for how they are.”
This might sort of approach being true, in an abstract ideal absolute sense, but Buddhism is explicitly pragmatic and moderate in its approach. Nearly all of the intervening territory is acknowledged as progressive. There are inspired moments of realization, and there are more or less some explicit landmarks, but mostly it is a way of being which while heading in a particular direction, is more about the quality and authenticity of the journey than an ultimate destination.
Also, the point is not to extinguish personal meaning. It is to recognize that “personal” is a conceit and not a meaningful distinction. It still exists, it just operates differently when we correct our conception about it. The same is true for existence. The point is not that the self doesn’t exist, just that it isn’t separate from what we think of “different than self”. There is still an underlying structure, it just isn’t a collection of permanently distinct pieces.
“Lack of desire is the same as apathy, in fact that is the conclusion of the Middle way which is indifference.”
Acceptance is not quite the same as indifference. I can see why that would be confusing though, they do see superficially similar. Acceptance doesn’t require action but it allows it. Indifference refuses to act. The important thing here though is the idea that contentment doesn’t prevent action, it just makes those actions that are based entirely on expectation or striving obsolete. There are still other natural drives which exist and will continue to occur.
“If you still have them then you still have desire, if you enjoy things you are not being equal.”
You’re saying two different things here…
First that happiness is by definition the satisfying of a desire. Really though, happiness is our natural state, and desire is a distraction from happiness. Without desire, we would still be happy, all that would change is that we wouldn’t transition from unhappy to happy. We associated happiness with fulfilling desire because we notice when we fulfill a desire, we stop being unhappy and temporarily seem happy. What most people fail to notice is that if we understand how to stop desires from happening in the first place, we would just be happy all the time. It’s not satisfying the desire that makes us happy, it’s that we give ourselves a reason to stop the desire.
Second, is the idea that there are different degrees of happiness. And that this violates nonseperateness. I assume this is what you mean by not equal. There are still gradients. There are still locations. What there aren’t is borders. And sure, perhaps if you continue things to their extreme limit, you may conceive of being able to associate with such a pure abstraction of reality that levels of enjoyment become irrelevant, but were one to actually reach such a state, enjoyment in any sense still meaningful would already be maximal anyway. In any case, while such abstraction can be projected, remember Buddhism is pragmatic. It’s only really concerned with ending suffering, which naturally results in bliss, but bliss isn’t the explicit aim.
" I’m saying that the end game of Buddhism is a colorless void. "
Not really. The end game is ending suffering. This requires a certain level of understanding of the nature of non separateness. But there are many levels to understanding, from a basic intellectual conception, to a deep experiential direct awareness. The level of understanding necessary to satisfy merely the goal of ending suffering is somewhere is the middle. You could choose to explore past this point, and conjecture about what the natural projection of these ideas might result in at their extreme limits, and that might eventually superficially resemble a colorless void, but that’s not really what Buddhism is about, and those people who have tried to explore closer to that supposed void tend to end up reporting a more interesting and enjoyable experience.
Regardless of what you might think you should expect, using the same reasoning, one would expect athiests and anyone who is aware of the extent of the universe which is effectively irrelevant to our day to day existence to also be apathetic, and that is clearly not the case. There is a good reason for the absurdum part of reductio.
“Not pessimism but not optimism. It’s literally nothing. I think the mystics, monks, and possibly Buddha did some gymnastics to convince themselves that their teachings don’t lead to paralysis. These aren’t misunderstandings, these are the holes that they try to dodge with “mind” and “Ego”.”
Again, it is not nothing. It is non separateness.
And you have things completely backwards. Doing what Buddha did naturally results in certain experiences and understandings. If the results weren’t replicable independently, no one would bother. If you followed a recipe, and one person got cake, another got meatballs, and another got rotting phlegm, the recipe would be quickly forgotten or ridiculed. There wouldn’t be a group of fan boys trying to convince people their meatballs are really cake.
Anyway, it is clear that neither the Buddha nor followers experienced paralysis as a result of the teachings. So I guess you are saying a large group of skeptical thoughtful explorers with extensive direct experiences from which to enrichen their conceptual frameworks, all somehow managed to delude themselves into the same exact self contradictory error, which they all failed to recognize, but which is also absurdly obvious to you, having made only a cursory examination? Does that really seem reasonable? Use Ocaam’s razor.
Which is really more likely, that that sort of apparent error is the result a fundamental flaw, or that you have a misunderstanding?
"Compassion and ending suffering aren’t compatible by nature, humans just conflate the two. "
You could maybe say they aren’t directly equivalent, but that in no way implies incompatibility for this, or even as a general principle. In what way do you conceive of them as largely distinct, let alone incompatible?
“even though buddhism makes one discard value”
It discards intrinsic external value, and certain aspects of the separation between external and internal, but it does not discard the existence of value. In fact it explicitly assumes that ending suffering is valuable.
“it does not by extension mean that one should do the same for others”
It’s not an extension, it is a natural result of combining non suffering with non separation.
“That seems to be rooted in some level of biology (which still doesn’t mean you should, it just compells you to) and culture.”
Ok, then you agree with the idea that there exist drives which aren’t related to meaning. All we disagree about then is their range and extent.
Buddhism doesn’t say you should be compassionate. Buddhism doesn’t say anything about should. It says if you want to end suffering, you need to understand separateness. Being compassionate is one technique towards achieving that understanding, and obviously broad compassion is more powerful than isolated compassion. But it is a moot point, because even if you explicitly ignore compassion and use only other techniques, ending suffering and understanding non separateness successfully will almost always tend to have the side effect of compassion. And even those ideas are contextualized by an explicit admonition not to take things on faith but instead to try them, because they seem to work well for most people, but to ultimately decide based on your own results and experiences.
“Buddhism hides behind things (unintentionally) to avoid being exposed as nihilism. Nuance seems like an excuse to avoid commitment.”
Buddhism is not exactly a single self contained thing.
Basic Buddhism, with the goal of ending suffering, whatever nuances or conceptions it might meander through related to meaning and self, explicitly is based on the assumption that there is at least one goal which has some sort of meaning or value. There is just no way to call that nihilistic.
Extended Buddhism, basically, ok, we stopped suffering, yay! What else can we do? Hmm, these understandings of non separateness and impermanence and so forth, might have further interesting implications, let us explore that. Also, how do these ideas relate to other philosophies, and to our cultural background? What happens if we extend certain understandings or practices past the minimum degree needed solely to end suffering? Also, at which level are these phenomena acting - base reality, in the brain, chemically, consciously, something deeper?
There are certain directions you go in with some aspects of extended Buddhism, that do superficially seem like they might head towards some abstract notion similar in a very shallow way to something like nothingness. But at these extreme limits, there isn’t a consensus, we start to stray pretty far from the core of what Buddhism is for, and what we conceive of as nothingness stops making sense when you try to translate it into a far removed context with vastly different rules and nature.
Saying nonseperateness is equivalent to nothingness is similar to claiming that once a pond stops rippling, that it ceases to exist. The form changes, but it doesn’t get erased.
There are certain realizations which can lead temporarily to a dissociative state which can be paralysing, but these are qualitatively different than the sorts of realizations typically associated with Buddhism.
It is easy to make armchair predictions about how things should work, but when every experiment other people do has a different result, maybe it’s worth investigating one’s assumptions and starting to perform experiments to test them.