Why is Buddhism not Nihilism? I'm familiar with the concept of the middle way and how Buddhism is neither Eternalism nor Nihilism. Not being Eternalism seems straightforward to me - all things are impermanent. However Buddhism not being Nihilism takes a bit more thought, for me anyway.

So can anyone state for us why Buddhism is not Nihilism? When we start to get into concepts like voidness and emptiness it can start to seem like it is edging towards it. When I practice it seems like anything but Nihilism. However I think I would struggle to write down why that is.

Just to clarify the question could we take the existential view of nihilism so quoting from wiki


  life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
I believe it all comes down to the way one sees reality. One could argue that as everything has been changing since the beginninless time, everything is "Eternal", it is just changing shapes.

I believe the point regarding the middle way is how things exist:

Eternalism suggests things exist as they are. The chair is a chair, it has a "chair-nature", it goes against the dependent origination. Also the name 'chair' is just a convention, nothing more.

Nihilism as we know it is a recent phenomena. The name has a Latin origin, so in the time of the Buddha Nihilism didn't exist like today. It was more related to ascetic practices of thinking that the world is a illusion and nothing exists at all. So the Buddha was trying to explain that things DO exist, but not as we think. There IS a chair, but it does not own a chair-nature. It is something transitory, impermanent with a dependent origination that we perceive with the eye-consciousness