#huanbo

For Buddhism the problem of lack can be resolved only by ceasing to avoid it and instead becoming-one with it: letting-go of oneself and falling into the void, in order to realise that the void is not really void but the nondual realm of the Buddha-dharma, as Ch'an master Huang-po put it. What does this mean in terms of nihilism? To stop evading the debacle of all meaning and accept it, which requires experiencing the meaninglessness of one's life -- an anguish not to be recommended lightly. Such understanding of the solution also transforms our understanding of the problem, for this solution is usually understood as the problem. This implies that true nihilism is less the debacle of meaning than our terror of that debacle and the ways we flee it, which includes a compulsive need to find some meaning in life as a bulwark against that threat. If so, nihilism is not our lack but the fear and denial of that lack, experienced in this instance as impending loss of meaning. Insofar as Nietzsche's will-to-power is in flight from lack, then, the will-to-power is nihilism. Eternal Recurrence insures that flight will have no cloture, for it tries to fill up lack by flight itself, by repeated recurrence of the passing moment. Thus eternal recurrence would not be final victory over nihilism, but  the final victory of nihilism: in grasping at the fleeting now by making it recur, it misses and loses the now that right now does-not-fall-away, and deflects us from the opposite solution of yielding to the nonbeing we most dread, which  we might discover to be not so dreadful after all.