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View submission: Buddhism is NOT life-denying.
I don’t know enough about nihilism to truly speak on it so I won’t try to.
In regards to the precepts, they are absolutely not meaningless. In Buddhism your thoughts and actions have karmic effects. You can’t really just do whatever you want, that’s the whole point of living according to the 8 fold path because it keeps your karma and thoughts in line.
There are many schools of Buddhism with their own interpretations and practices and what not, much like other religions. For example, in pure land Buddhism they see the Buddha as somewhat of a god and worship him, and the goal is to do good deeds and be reborn into a heaven realm. Ironically, all of those ideas are very antithetical to the Buddhas actual teachings. Stuff like this happens because of how religions change as different cultures adopt them.
I study most of my Buddhism from Theravada Buddhism, which is the oldest and most accurate to the actual teachings of the Buddha, however I do my practice at a zen temple and love Japanese culture so I participate in and have an appreciation for the zen practice. One thing I would say about Zen however is that it’s rather free flowing and takes many liberties. Zen practice takes a much more direct approach to enlightenment and deals more with trying to peer into the nature of reality on one’s own in a more abstract way. In a lot of ways I feel like it skips over a lot of important steps that the Buddha outlined, and cosmological aspects of the workings of karma and a lot of other practical elements.
Because of this I can see why some zen practitioners can seem somewhat nihilist to you. I can assure you though that the Buddha would never approve of any idea that nullifies the precepts, particularly the one about killing. Most of the other precepts have a sliding scale of severity and consequences, but specifically the killing one, especially maliciously and intentionally, has extreme consequences.
There's nothing here!