Beyond semiosis: early Buddhist phenomenology and theory of consciousness

The Pārāyanavagga, an early Buddhist text, is argued to express a theory of intentionality. Comparing it with Husserl’s phenomenology and Peirce’s phaneroscopy, the paper contends that the text presents contemplative practice as an exercise in deconstructing semiosic forces—unconscious processes that shape intentionality and cognition of the world. The goal is to transcend these forces into a state of Beyondness, surpassing intentionality and cognitive mechanisms of world-construction. This transcendence is hypothesized to occur through three fundamental semiosic forces, one primary and two subordinate. The article offers a semiological reading in comparative analysis with phenomenology, not a philological analysis.

Study at a glance

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.