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.
