Abstract

Setting out to explore phenomenological affinities between Charles Sanders Peirce’s phaneroscopy and Abhidharma Buddhist theories of consciousness and perception, this paper draws upon synergies between semiotic methodology and Buddhist applications in the spirit of intercultural philosophy. A Peircean interpretation of Buddhism and, reciprocally, a Buddhist development of Peirce’s philosophy can build upon a deeply phenomenological stance in both cases. As with a pansemiotic universe of signs and relations, what matters about the physical world in Buddhism is its being cognised by a sentient being. However, rather than to construe an interpreting mind by means of a psychological subject, the Buddhist “scholastic” analysis of commonsense subjects and objects into minimal experiential events accords well with locating agency in the semiosic arising of consciousness moments.