Impact of Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) towards Semiotics

Abstract

Dependent origination or dependent arising (Pratītyasamutpāda) is the central idea of Buddhist thought (6th BCE in India), which discloses the entire creation of human physics in terms of the mechanism of living matters in the body and mind, while semiotics is the modern science of linguistics for understanding the structure of signs and symbols in meaning making in the use of human language and communication, which is produced in the early 20th century in Europe and USA. This present study reveals the exposure of Buddhist thought of dependent origination on the modern theory of semiotics. While dependent origination is functioning for a definite answer for the composition of human being, problems associated with the human behavior which could be managed by the understanding of the practice of dependent arising. At the same time semiotics has been using not only for meaning making in the use of signs, but also it is highly significant in the use of descriptive analysis of social systems and human behavior in analytical philosophy. After diagnostically reading these two theories, this study assumes that the Buddhist thought of the creation of living objects has been fundamental in forming the semiotics, which is one of the modern western analytical philosophies. Despite of the fact that Buddhist thought centrally explores the existence of human being for its cessation from suffering (dhukka), same exposition can be utilized for identifying ones’ intra-personal communication using dependent origination. On the other, semiotics is a tool of modern analysis for human intra-personal communication. However, finally this study finds that the Buddhist thought of dependent origination could be immensely accommodating to understand semiotics as it is used for modern social analysis ranging from anthropological hermeneutics to cyber cognition.