Hello,

I have come to this forum because I am looking for very specific help. I met a young Chinese person who told me that 霊 and 靈 are not just different forms of the same meaning but that 靈 has the nuance of "evil spirit" while 霊 is neutral. I thought that 靈 was just the kyuujitai or older form of 霊 and that the meaning was the same. I asked this to some Japanese people and they said they have not ever seen 靈 before. If you know anything about this, can you help me?

As far as Japanese goes, you are correct.

I cannot say 100% for certain that the Chinese person you talked to is wrong about how the characters are used in Chinese, but I am pretty sure he's wrong.

To elaborate, this was brought up when I showed him this complicated kanji: http://moji.tekkai.com/zoom/%F0%A7%A2%B1/page.html , which is an alternate form of　性. He said that he thought 靈 was used as the meaning radical in that kanji because it had the sense of "evil spirit" and sex is considered an "evil desire" in Buddhism. But this is the first time in all my studies where I heard anything about 靈 specifically meaning "evil spirit".

Looks like they're just variants:
https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%88

龗 is pretty badass imo

About his point; 表外字 tend to be written with traditional components.

Well yeah, what seems to be an obsolete character would definitely use the traditional forms. I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that the right character part was 靈 instead of 霊. Maybe I just misunderstood him and he really meant that either 霊 or 靈 had the general sense of "evil spirit" in some compound words.

Curiously, the only word in JMdict that uses 靈 is 靈氣, some kind spiritual healing b.s. fashionable among new-age hippy types that I've been meaning to look up for some time.

That can just be written 霊気 as well; there's nothing special about using the old characters.