See you later, Siddhartha!

 If there really are "no Buddhas and no teachings," then why didn't Subhuti just leave after Chapter 8 of the Diamond Sutra? 

And no, Stephen Batchelor, Robert Wright, Thich Nhat Hanh and others, that's not facetious. Wright's wrong for other reasons and in other ways.

Of course, we'd only have one-third of a Diamond Sutra at that point.

That said, the claim that, in terms of metaphysical entities like souls, neither existence nor non-existence "exist," and ditto for returning and non-returning, aka reincarnation or not, as well, is itself a metaphysical stance.

And, since learning this metaphysical stance is aided by meeting in congregations, sorry again, Bob Wright, but yes, Buddhism is a religion. That's contra claims otherwise.

As for "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," since there are no Buddhas, there's nobody to kill. If you meet an alleged Buddha on the road, don't kill him either literally or metaphorically. Move on. Besides, the alleged actual Buddha couldn't formulate essential dogma correctly. And he, and his disciples, undercut their claims of ineffability.

THAT's detachment.

And, I'll continue to prefer a non-metaphysical philosophical existentialism instead. Camus (my starting point, not Sartre, Dostoyevsky or Kierkegaard) never rejected the idea of "this, not that"; that is, he never rejected human nature, including its nature of distinguishing A from B.

Once you accept that, and that parts of life actually are suffering (and not per the Buddha's phrase getting that dogma wrong, above), you can address the "ultimate question," and when you recognize your human body exists, and some semi-unified something-like-a-self exists with it, decide that life's suffering is still worth it.