You’ve literally used “all things” as phenomena, that’s the funny part! 
Since if “dhamma” is more than mere concepts, then that precisely means dhamma is referring to “phenomena”.
Anyway, I think we’re talking past each other at this point. 
Love.
Interesting suggestion. I don’t have fundamental pragmatical issues with it (like I do with readings in which the sage is assumed to be in some ineffable state). But I think you’re reading too much into it, resulting in a reading that’s unnecessarily complicated. The final verse reads more naturally if throughout it concerns the same subject matter. It doesn’t suddenly switch from the “after-death” to the “while-alive” in the middle.
I wouldn’t put it like this, because it sounds like there actually is a real Tathāgata but that we just can’t speak about him. That’s not the point, I think you agree.
Either way, the single word “Tathāgata” is not the same as all ways of speaking. All ways of speaking aren’t actually removed at enlightenment, as seen in the Yamaka Sutta extract I quoted before. You can still say that the aggregates exist and that they will cease.
I don’t see how this supports the suggestion. Here it can also be read as “all things”. Whatever exists, the Buddha is unaffected by it all.
I’m not very keen on this translation of MN22. Let me suggest an alternative:
When the gods—including Indra, Brahmā, and Prajāpati—seek for a mendicant who had such a liberated mind [and then passed away], wondering what that Truthfinder’s consciousness is supported by, they will not find them. Why? Even during life there is no Truthfinder to be found, I tell you.
Anyway, even if we adopt the other translation, it doesn’t say that all manners of speech are abandoned here and now. Instead, the idea is again anattā: that there is no essence called the Tathāgata in the first place, let alone to be annihilated (as some hereafter mistake the Buddha to teach) or to continue forever (as those gods who search for the Tathāgata’s consciousness believe).
But we can still say that there is suffering (i.e. aggregates) which arises and ceases. As the Buddha concludes this section of MN22: “In the past and also now, I assert only suffering and a cessation of suffering.” To assert something is to say something. But what the Buddha doesn’t assert is, again, the existence and annihilation of a self (i.e. Tathāgata, muni, truly existing being, etc). Despite his translation, Bhikkhu Bodhi also noted that this is how he understood the passage.
And it fits my understanding of the Upasiva Sutta as well. In short, I think the Niddesa is on point:
‘When all things (sabba dhamma) are terminated’ means: when all things, all aggregates, all senses, all elements […] have been terminated.
I think we’ve exhausted all manners of speaking about the topic. 
Thanks for your patient elaborations, bhante. 
we’ve exhausted all manners of speaking about the topic.
Mais non!
Sir, certainly; I wouldn’t expect frequent contributors on this forum to think otherwise.
This seems quite a jump, even with the two points you made to support it. I say this realizing there is a hefty amount of respected scholarship you bring with you. I’m not saying this to be disrespectful at all. I’ve read your work for years.
Still, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s used only to refer to a liberated person who’s still living by definition.
Those who are much more qualified than me talk to this in the thread. I don’t find that as interesting (lucky me!).
What does interest me is the first metaphor in the sutta – that of crossing over the flood. There is little, if any, ambiguity as to its meaning in the Pali studies as far as I know.
I happened on a newspaper article this morning about end-of-life experiences. The article references the below paper (and speaks to the paper’s findings as well):
Depner RM, Grant PC, Byrwa DJ, LaFever SM, Kerr CW, Tenzek KE, LaValley S, Luczkiewicz DL, Wright ST, Levy K, AdvStat M.
Expanding the Understanding of Content of End-of-Life Dreams and Visions: A Consensual Qualitative Research Analysis.
Palliat Med Rep. 2020 Jul 7;1(1):103-110. doi: 10.1089/pmr.2020.0037. PMID: 34223465; PMCID: PMC8241341.:
From the paper:
This [particular] domain evaluates actions/events that occurred within the ELDV and resulted in 14 subcategories (Table 6). Typically, participants reported activities related to Traveling and Movement. One said, “I am on a bicycle coming down a steep curving mountain highway. I find that the speed of the bike is getting dangerously fast.”
Apparently other travel experiences are more gentle .
In any case, my point is to suggest that a traveling metaphor for people trying to move on – in this case, physically die – doesn’t have to be construed as nihilistic.
To suggest the “moving on” must be a transcendent state in this life – otherwise it’s nihilistic – seems forced.
Another (completely different) study examines nihilism in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible. Obviously I’m straying far away from the Buddha’s cessation teachings. However there remain some interesting parallels (so long as we don’t take them as anything more):
My point is instead to illuminate the fact that everything, if considered closely
enough, reveals that [the meaning of Ecclesiastes] is grounded upon and shaped by an intrinsic condition that resists being made meaningful. This resistance to meaning is itself the ה ב ל [Hebrew word] of which Qohelet speaks.
Is it fair to say that the Buddha’s cessation teachings – the disappearing and not reappearing, the absence of any kinds of states in this life recurring – are meaningful in every sense of the word? That they do not resist being meaningful but rather are wholly imbued with meaning?
@Dogen I’m rather far from the fire metaphor so feel free to ask the mods to peel it off 
It’s not the idea of a sage “moving on” that’s considered nihilistic but the idea of a sage getting extinguished.
The word nihilism is so wide, we’d have to define it first. Is it moral nihilism, or existential nihilism, or …?
But if my “nihilism” is meant “annihilationism” as in the suttas, then it is right to say that the disappearance of a truly existing sage is nihilistic. But then, in my reading that’s Upasiva’s suggestion (alongside eternalism), not the Buddha’s.
Wynne’s suggestion is that annihilationism is avoided if the Buddha is speaking only about liberation in the present life (from “conceptuality”). In my view, annihilationism can be avoided in other ways, even with the fire simile referring to death.
Some even take this simile to say the sage after death is forever in some ineffable state. I think that’s going into the other extreme, that of eternalism. But even in this case the simile is taken to be about the “hereafter”.
If there was no Upasiva in the first place, if he was rather a type of mental construct, then he cannot be annihilated. Something that’s not really there can’t be annihilated.
“There is no measure of the one who has come to rest, Upasīva,” said the Gracious One,
there is nothing by which they can speak of him,
when everything has been completely removed,
all the pathways for speech are also completely removed.”
