SuttaCentral
But no one is denying it is a very positive emotional experience (sukkha)!
To get cool some cooling needs to take place.
But the cooling is not the same as the coolness, or absence of heat it requires.
Cooling is the way to the absence of heat.
The salvation of the Buddha Dhamma is the absence of heat, the emotionally positive experience of the cooling required for absence of heat to become a reality is the happiness related to the salvation of the Buddha Dhamma.
To employ the same fire metaphor, I think it is not just the cooling down process that is described as blissfully happy, but the state of being fully cooled itself. The fire that is extinguished is the fire of tanha, and the greed, hatred and confusion that are its accompaniments. When that fire has fully gone out, it doesnât follow that there is nothing left - not even happiness. There is happiness present in the purified and liberated state, but the happiness that remains is not the worldly kind of happiness that depends on sensory pleasure or the gratification of worldly desire. It is also not experienced as self. The happiness is present, but not the thought or conception âI am happy.â
Thatâs exactly what I meant by:
How can we call someone who aims to verify this salvation by himself a miserable buddhist 
?!
Wherefore, Änanda,
be no measurer of persons;
measure not the measure of persons;
verily, Änanda,
he digs a pit for himself
who measures the measure of persons.
I alone, Änanda,
can measure their measure -
or one like me.
âAN6.44
this pleasure i think was only recommended as a temporary recourse in the ocean of suffering, a nibbana for the poor as it were, a hideout from impingements of the world, since the Buddha himself experienced suffering caused by his ageing body, and as an antidote to sensual pleasures, a kind of a surrogate, replacement therapy, a provisional measure to get by while faring to total unbinding, sort of nicotine free cigarettes (the true nature of these cigarettes aside), being both a pleasure and non-harmful at the same time, because experience of all this bliss ends in the 4th jhana with perfect equanimity
arahants are beyond the dichotomy of pleasure and suffering, happiness and misery
where do you think this happiness go after an arahant dies, when thereâs no means of experiencing this happiness, or does it linger?
I may have misunderstood you. But let me try to clarify what I am suggesting:
Happiness about some other fact is what philosophers have sometimes called an intentional state. In this context âintentionalâ is not being used in the limited way to refer to cetana or the will, but in a more comprehensive way to describe any mental state that is directed toward, or is about, something else. So a belief, for example, is an intentional state in this traditional philosophical state because a belief always has some kind of mental object: a state of affairs, proposition, or something similar. Most of our mental states are intentional in this way, because they are directed toward, and in some way dependent on, objects of thought.
My suggestion is that the fundamental happiness that is present in the experience of the arahant following total release is not an intentional state. The arahant is not simply happy about the fact that something else is the case. Itâs not just the case that the arahant realizes that he no longer experiences any lust, for example, and is happy over or about the absence of lust - in either the present or the future. The happiness of the arahant is a pure, unalloyed, unconditioned happiness that doesnât depend in any way on the cognitive grasp or appraisal of any state of affairs external to itself. It is a completely free-standing, unconditioned and independent happiness. It is total bliss.
What I characterized as the âmiserableâ version of the teaching is the version that says that all experience of every kind is rotten, and so the goal itself is the complete extinguishing of all experience - even happiness, and the arahant is thus only happy because they are happy about the fact that their long and miserable life, and indeed every experience of every kind, is finally coming to an end. That is, I would say, a miserable teaching because it treats the happiness that occurs at the successful completion of the quest as analogous to the happiness of the person with a suicide wish who is only exulting in relief because he has just confirmed that he has been sentenced to death by firing squad.
I think it comes to an end. But since the arahant is liberated, the knowledge that it is coming to an end is no longer a source of regret or grief for that arahant. They are no longer engaged in the process of I-making and my-making, no longer involved in the anxious project of the âarchitectâ of attempting to build a self out of the ingredients of heir experience. And therefore they no longer have all the craving, fear and anxiety that goes along with a construction project, the desire to perpetuate the existence of what is being constructed, and the awareness that it will ultimately fail. They are fully aware that the happiness that suffuses their experience will end, but no longer experience that as the worrisome ego-based thought âOh no! I am coming to an end!â
i donât think this analogy can be ascribed to this view of nibbanic experience of an arahant, because an arahant is known to be free from vibhava tanha
and surely happiness, or as i see it rather sense of relief and deliverance, of an arahant is due to liberation from suffering and not to anticipation of the forthcoming self-annihilation, although you disagree with this opinion
Vimutti or liberation (MN 29; MN 43). 
If we go by the 3rd definition of âsalvationâ that WordWeb is giving me, yes I think so.
The state of being saved or preserved from harm
From the most mundane to the most supramundane teachings, theyâre all directed toward this.
OK, but using that sense, it seems the salvation that Buddhism offers might best be understood as temporary. Is Sariputta, for example, currently being saved or preserved from harm? It would seem not. Of course, Sariputta is no longer in a state of danger or harm, either. But neither is he in a state of safety. The âSariputta processâ came to a final end about two and a half millenia ago, and is now only a historical memory. Thus Buddhist salvation, if thatâs what it should be called, seems quite different from Christian salvation, according to which the saved enjoy eternal life.
Why should this be âmiserableâ ? I disagree that there is only âsome textual supportâ for the admittedly bleak flavor of the Teaching. Most of the canon appears to be relentlessly repeating how everything in life is dissatisfactory and how absolute renunciation is the highest liberation. The Dhamma appealed to people who were in abject conditions - the Therigatha contains many such instances like Canda (the phrase Hearing her words speaks volumes about how the mind must be malleable enough to receive and accept the Dhamma). This seems quite natural, since people who already feel battered and weak wonât have much trouble accepting the First Noble Truth.
But there are also instances in which individuals whose lives were well-off still managed to see that all is not rosy and then sought unfettered liberation - the ascetics from rich households, for example. In both cases, the Path is the same and hinges on Right View, or rather, oneâs arrival at Right View, which is especially hard when one is coasting through life. Schopenhauer summed this up rather well:
itâs demonstrably different which nevertheless doesnât make it any less a salvation, as salvation (and all its synonyms of various degrees) is usually first understood as being from something rather than towards something and in this respect application of the word is even more adequate to Buddhist type of salvation
If you think Sariputta existed as a Self then yes, it is worse than suicide.
If only phenomena arising and passing away existed, nibbana is much better.
with metta
Mat
Well, I think however we end up metaphysically understanding the psychological and biological processes that constituted Sariputtaâs life, the fact will remain that during Sariputtaâs later lifetime, one could have asked him, âAre you awakened?â And he would have said something like, âYes, I have attained the goal, and it is pretty wonderful - unsurpassed bliss.â And now that Sariputtaâs life has completely come to an end, there is no longer a Sariputta-process that includes the enjoyment of that unsurpassed bliss. So it seems to me that the goal of the Buddhist path is something that some people achieve, and that lasts for as long as their life runs on after that achievement, and that then comes to an end when their life comes to an end.
If you leave out the metaphysical understanding of heaven, the alternate (Christian) option is to live suffering and then die.
With metta
Well, yes. If you leave out the most important parts of anything, the results are less impressive than what you get if you leave the important parts in. 
But I agree that Christianity shouldnât get points vis-a-vis Buddhism for preaching fantasies.
I guess my point is that the concepts of salvation and soteriology as they appear in the western academic study of religion are heavily connected with the Christian idea of a deliverance from the largely negative experience of fallen world into the perpetual and wholly positive experience of eternal life. If a doctrine instead preaches only temporary deliverance into a positive experience, itâs not clear to me that it is appropriate to call that a doctrine of salvation.
Even to say an arahant is âsavedâ is going too far, but Iâd say itâs the best way weâve got to describe it.
I agree it is different from the Christian idea of soteriology, but that doesnât mean we canât co-opt the word. 
Yes, Iâm not really worried so much about Buddhists, and whether or not they want to use the term, but about western scholars distorting Buddhism by running it through the scholarly machinery forged to study Christianity, and as a result fabricating a deceptive universality.
There is an old story that when westerners first started studying Buddhism, they would refer to Buddhist temples as churches! It may be just a tale, but it makes a good point. Using the terminology of one domain to describe another domain is bound to bring with it all kinds of assumptions that will distort understanding.
Well, I was surprised when I started going to a nearby vihara, and found out that the Thai people coming there called it a âtempleâ!