The Sanskrit, and more widely known, equivalent of nibanna is nirvana. This word is particularly difficult to translate because people have so many strange assumptions about it. It's envisioned as either a place of heavenly, lasting ecstasy or a fearful place where the self is completely annihilated. According to the Buddha, it's really neither. It's a mind-transforming break in the ongoing mental stream of continual craving, and it's pretty much impossible to describe in language. It's the fruit of the Buddhist path. When I was 23 I vowed to reach nibanna by the time I was 30. Six years later I have a long way to go.

"The process of rebirth can only be stopped by achieving Nirvana, first by adopting right views about the nature of existence, then by a carefully controlled system of moral conduct, and finally by concentration and meditation. The word literally means "blowing out," as of a lamp. In Nirvana all idea of an individual personality or ego ceases to exist and there is nothing to be reborn--as far as the individual is concerned Nirvana is annihilation. But it was certainly not generally thought of by the early Buddhists in such negative terms. It was rather conceived of as a transcendent state, beyond the possibility of full comprehension by the ordinary being enmeshed in the illusion of selfhood, but not fundamentally different from the state of supreme bliss as described in other non-theistic Indian systems."

[from: Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume I, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960)]

"...they went through various names, including Ted Ed Fred, Bliss ("I was on acid one night," Kurt explains), Throat Oyster, Pen Cap Chew, and Windowpane. And finally, the band settled on Nirvana, a Hindu and Buddhist concept which Webster's defines as "the extinction of desire, passion, illusion and the empirical self and attainment of rest, truth and unchanging being." That idea of heaven--a place, as David Byrne once put it, "where nothing ever happens"--sounds a lot like the way Kurt felt when he did heroin, but he says that wasn't the idea. "I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name like the Angry Samoans," says Kurt. "I wanted to have something different." These days, Kurt isn't so crazy about the name any more. "It's too esoteric and serious," he says. And later on, he'd have to pay another band fifty thousand dollars for a name he didn't even care about that much."

[from: Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana; by Michael Azerrad (New York: Doubleday, 1994)]