Nihilism actually means that nothing has intrinsic meaning, which is not out of line with Buddhist thought. It was a response to the Christian idea, which developed further during the Renaissance, where everything is infused with the mind of God, so that some things have intrinsic meanings. Then the nihilists came along and said that there is no intrinsic meaning. If you attach that in the direction of Buddhist thought, then the meaning that we create and assign to things is based on our conditioning.

Nihilism has of course drifted in our culture of fastness, where nothing is very deep, into an idea that nothing has meaning. But “nothing has meaning” as a concept is very different from the concept of “nothing has intrinsic meaning”. So in some sense, the nihilism of “nothing has meaning” would have you justify detachment from things – it doesn’t matter what you do because nothing matters. It’s very different from the way in which we make up meaning that we assign to things. Because each of us assigns different meanings to the same thing, there is no single meaning to something.

We know that we live in a body that will grow old, we know that we live in a body that is subject to sickness, and we know that we live in a body that will die. On that side of things, where nothing ultimately matters, it can be paralyzing, in terms of our willingness to explore what it’s possible to find out about this human life. So I do not mind the nihilism of things not having intrinsic meaning, where each person’s sense of meaning has value in it. I am not for the Renaissance evaluation of things that are holy and things that are not holy.

I have never resonated with the idea that there is a cosmic meaning to things which is fixed. I did not really have much of the experience of sacredness, until I started to do the Six Lamps practice, a Tibetan Bon practice, which opened up the experience of sacredness for me. But one of the things I know from practice is that you tend to have the kind of insight that is related to the kind of practice that you do, that if you engage in practices that typically produce a sense of sacredness, it’s unremarkable that you would have experiences of sacredness doing those practices.