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Beyond semiosis: early Buddhist phenomenology and theory of consciousness

Federico Divino

Cogent Arts and Humanities July 16, 2025 DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2025.2529679 (opens in new tab)

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Characteristics Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed
Topics Buddhism Philosophy of mind
Keywords Phenomenology philosophy Semiosis Consciousness Epistemology Psychoanalysis Semiotics Theology
Citations 4
Key points Proposes that the Pārāyanavagga expresses a theory of intentionality in early Buddhism, arguing that contemplative practice aims to deconstruct unconscious semiosic forces to achieve a state of 'Beyondness'.

Abstract

This paper is a proposal for analyzing the Pārāyanavagga as a text that fundamentally expresses a theory of intentionality in early Buddhism. Through a comparison with Husserl’s phenomenology and Peirce’s phaneroscopy, the paper argues that the contents of the Pārāyanavagga—as reintroduced in later suttas that further develop these reflections and which will be analyzed in depth—reveal how early Buddhism conceived of contemplative practice as an exercise fundamentally rooted in the necessity to deconstruct the semiosic forces that unconsciously act in the processes of intentionality and cognition of the ‘world’. The aim of the Pārāyanavagga is to propose a transcendence of these semiosic forces into a state of Beyondness, a surpassing of intentionality itself as well as the cognitive mechanisms of apprehending and constructing the world, which I hypothesize occurs through three fundamental semiosic forces, one primary and two subordinate to it. This article is not a philological analysis of the Pārāyanavagga (and, for contextual reasons, I will also introduce the nature of the text in question) but rather a semiological reading in comparative analysis with phenomenology.

Comparable studies

Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. 2006 Theoretical or philosophical paper
Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience 1995 Theoretical or philosophical paper
Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being 2005 Theoretical or philosophical paper
Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World 2017 Theoretical or philosophical paper
From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory 2016 Theoretical or philosophical paper

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Buddhism Philosophy of mind Meditation