(I'm posting this on both of your "Buddhism is wrong" articles, because it makes references to both.)
Nagarjuna makes a distinction between two extreme and incorrect views he calls Nihilism and Eternalism. Eternalism is the common sense view that the world is just out there, period, without being in any way influenced by our thoughts about it. Nihilism is the position that often arises in people who have shallow encounters with Buddhism. It basically consists of ideas like this:
“Reject your thoughts, reject yourself, all is illusion.”
“you and your thoughts are nothing.”
“Buddhism denies the self.”
“thoughts are. . . illusions that you can just dismiss.”
These quotes, in case you don’t notice, are all from your two articles on Buddhism. (It may seem like cheating to remove the word “not”, from the last quote, but your assertion that this claim is not true implies that you believe Buddhists think it is true.) These are common misinterpretations of Buddhist teachings, made not only by smug celebrities but arguably by some Theravadin practitioners. This is why Nagarjuna had to make the distinction between Nihilism and Eternalism, which reveals the errors of both common sense and incorrectly understood Buddhism. Nagarjuna took a rather Aristotelian view of this polarity by saying that the truth required what he called the Madhyamika, or Middle way, between these extremes. The links you provided in your second article actually provide defenses of the middle way, and rejections of the Nihilism you are arguing for here. (This is of course different from the kind of moral nihilism discussed by more modern writers like Nietzsche and Sartre).
From your Stanford Encyclopedia link:
“The teaching of no self depends on a crucial distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth. Those entities that exist ultimately have an existence that is robustly metaphysically objective, whereas things at the conventional level are said to exist as a result of a process of conceptual construction. . . According to the Buddhist tradition, in order for something to exist at the ultimate level, it would have to be findable under analysis: that is, careful philosophical examination would have to be able to find a clear and defensible explanation of how it exists. If conceived of as existing over and above their parts, composite entities fail this test; when analyzed, they disappear, as we can give no satisfactory account of how they relate to their parts”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shantideva/#MetaNoSelfEmpt
In other words, The Middle Way position says that the mind does not have ultimate reality only because it consists of parts. It is thus every bit as real as any object existing in the world, such as table a chair or a chariot.
Your link to the Tibetan Buddhist encyclopedia quotes a comparison between the mind and a chariot.
1. There is no chariot which is other than its parts.
2. There is no chariot which is the same as its parts.
3. There is no chariot which inherently possesses its parts.
4. There is no chariot which inherently depends on its parts.
5. There is no chariot upon which its parts are inherently dependent.
6. There is no chariot which is the mere collection of its parts.
7. There is no chariot which is the shape of its parts.
Likewise there is no self which could be found separate from the basis of designation, i.e. the aggregates.
This leads to the conclusion that the self is every bit as real as a chariot, even though neither chariots nor selves have fundamental reality. It is basically the same position that was called “Scientific Realism” by Analytic Philosophers in the 1950s. J.C.C. Smart, for example, claimed that tables and chairs (and chariots, although he didn’t give that example) didn’t have fundamental reality because what they really are is aggregates of atoms and subatomic particles. None of this implies that we should claim tables and chariots don’t exist at all. Instead it means we can only fully understand them if we see them as manifestations of other more fundamental structures. Similarly, Middle Way Buddhism claims that the mind lacks independent existence, and can only be understood as something that arises dependently from structures like the Five Skandas. If you can experience your mind this way, it becomes much easier to recognize that we can be at choice about what we develop attachments to and aversions from.
