Meditation Transcending Signs: Seven Concepts for a Buddhist Psychosemiotics

This paper aims to provide an in-depth and detailed overview of the relationship between language and cognition in Pāli Buddhist texts. These reflections will touch on several fundamental themes, such as the role of signs in structuring cognitive processes and semiosis as a force linked to the proliferation of concepts and percepts, whose organization underlies the constitution of a shared and partly subjective “world”. The paper will engage with linguistics, semiotics, and biosemiotics in order to acquire a vocabulary capable of better understanding the Buddhist reflections on these issues, and, where possible, it will also offer a genealogical inquiry that explains why the theme of language takes on the pivotal role it holds in Pāli Buddhism.