Basically, read DN1 and DN2 and you will I hope see that;
According to scripture, at the time of the buddha various things where known.
First, a group called “annihilationists” practiced a thing called “jhana”. A process of purifying ones perception of “what is existing” to higher and higher “heavens”.
The annihilationists all agreed that when your body dies your just dead. No rebith, just annihilation.
There was another tradition at the time that believed that the soul journeyed on through rebirth after rebirth until they had done them all, a deterministic system.
There was a third tradition which held that it was impossible to know if annihilationism or eternalism was true, this group was called the skeptics.
The buddha came along and said there was a 4th position, that is, unlike the skeptics, the buddha showed that it was possible to have knowledge about what the skeptics claimed they could never know.
That is that any of the expressed views:
Temporary
Elternal
Both
Niether
Go “beyond the scope of language and reasoning” and are therefore not propositions that should be regarded as true false both or neither.
However is was possible to show how any actually given phenomena, without recourse to temporal distinctions being applied out of scope, could be said to “depend” on other phenomena, which we likewise need not apply our temporal (or spatial) language to.
This is fundamentally the picture we have of early buddhism.
So we have a teacher, taking a technique from nihilists, that of jhana, and taking from the skeptics this logical structure taken in a new light, providing a meditative practice and a philosophical position at the same time.
Buddhism is basically the lovechild of a sensual nihilism and a type theory (dependent logic), and I think its grand.
But I think that it is simply impossible to see Buddhism as a “nihilism” when it is clearly something altogther richer and wierder and frankly, difficult to understand. (for me too I hope I am conveying .