No spirit. Spirit is a form of soul idea if you regard the spirit as permanent. While we can relabel things with different words, words and languages in general do have more of less fixed meanings and baggage with them, determined by society. Even when the meaning words evolve with time, we are fortunate to have Pāli as a dead language so that it’s meaning at least do not evolve in time. And we can always use the current understanding of words to point to what we wish to point to.
And no, all lot of these words you used carry too much baggage to be able to say it’s parinibbana.
These baggages, if one is not careful, will give rise to attachments.
Some interfaith people or Christian Buddhist might want to relabel what we call nibbana as their God. But the word God carries too much baggages from other kind of doctrine. God created the world, God acts like a sentient being. Those baggages do not apply to parinibbana. Same too with the words of Brahman, atma etc.
Sorry Bhante, i think you may have misunderstood. i was talking about the wrong view( in my opinion) held by some venerables in the thai forest sanga. Not my views, regarding parinibbana.
We need to separate conventional (relative) truth from ultimate truth here. When considering ultimate truth, the perception of the self happen as an arising/ceasing thought (happening in the present moment). So, we can ask ourselves “how can an arising/ceasing thought be a self?”
Though this thread is a little old, I suspect that from the responses you provide, the following links might be of help. Looking into an authentic interpretation of what Ramana Maharshi said about these matters – which is unique and not to be confounded with either modern or traditional Advaita – you might very well find your answers here. This is only one link into an incredibly documented website, filled with many topics and answers by Michael James (who studied and knows the original languages and texts that Ramana wrote).
