On the inherent pessimism of parinibbana as mere cessation

Again @Nikolas we just disagree, and I get it, you are a Theravada and I am not, but just on this whole conventional/absolute distinction I will qoute from a monk in your own tradtion @sujato who says in How Early Buddhism differs from Theravada: a checklist

the two truths
Theravada makes much of the doctrine of the “two truths”, conventional (sammutisacca) and ultimate (paramatthasacca). Conventional truth is the domain of such ultimately unreal notions like “persons”, “nations”, and the like, while the ultimate truth deals with the fundamental phenomena of existence (dhammas). This distinction applies both to the expression of the truth—where the Suttas are supposed to deal with conventional truth, while the Abhidhamma deals with ultimate truth—and the underlying realities spoken of, where the “ultimately true” phenomena are so by virtue of the fact that they have an “intrinsic essence” (sabhāva).

No such distinction is found in the EBTs. There we find the Buddha easily moves between discussions framed in terms of people and those in terms of phenomena, without having to impute any ontological significance to this distinction.

The fact that words have specialized meanings, and that what is true in one domain of discourse may not apply in another, is a normal feature of specialization and is not a characteristic of the Dhamma. In physics, for example, what we take to be solid matter is seen as energies moving in space. That doesn’t mean that the idea of “solidity” is wrong or lesser, it just means that it applies when considering things from some perspectives but not others. In the ordinary world we live in, “solidity” is perfectly real: no physicist tries to walk through walls.

When the term paramattha appears in the EBTs, it does not mean “ultimate meaning” or “ultimate reality” but “ultimate goal”, and is a word for Nibbana.

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