Escaping nothingness
Nihilism puzzles the West like cancer. The West treats cancer but can't cure it. The same is true with nihilism. Its symptoms can be treated with palliatives but a cure is altogether lacking so that one finds, in the end, life to be almost meaningless but not to the point where suicide is more preferable to living.
If religion can be thought of as a cure for nihilism then the West has nothing close in the way of a cure. A Western religion, like Christianity, can only hold out hope. But hope is not enough to cure nihilism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the worlds great religions have either lost the sacred cure for nihilism or never possessed it in the first place.
So what is the cure for nihilism in which empty things are constantly arising from nothing and falling back into nothing?
Lets begin to answer this inquiry by saying, straightaway, that the Buddhas enlightenment is the only cure there is for nihilism. In fact, only a Buddha escapes nihilism who has gone beyond the the unending, temporal waves of birth and death.
The Buddha has gone to the substance (tathagata) of phenomena which are, without exception, illusory. He is the eternal noumenon. Unlike ordinary beings, he is no longer bound to the nothingness that is constantly arising and falling back into itself, again and again. This nothingness, I hasten to add, is everyone and everything. It is samsara which hides nirvana.
