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Présentation : Sémiotique et bouddhisme. Quelques repères

Louis Hébert

Sémiotique bouddhiste : perspectives et questions ouvertes

Fabio Rambelli
After Roland Barthes had shown a passing interest for Japanese Zen Buddhism, several authors have begun to study semiotic aspects of the Buddhist tradition more in general. In the present article, the author describes the main characteristics of Barthes’s interpretation of Zen, in particular his fundamentally Orientalistic and modernist attitude and his distance from classical Buddhist thought. Then the author presents a series of issues and methodologies endowed with an explicit semiotic nature and content as they have been developed within the Buddhist tradition, beginning with the role of semiotics in Buddhist soteriology, and followed by more specific themes such as epistemology, the nature of reality and its representations, and textuality. Next, the author discusses an example of Buddhist strategies of sign remotivation. Finally, he proposes further research possibilities that call for a closer collaboration among semioticians and Buddhologists.

Une rencontre singulière entre structuralisme et bouddhisme : Saussure, Bouddha, Lévi-Strauss

Sungdo Kim
In this paper we attempted to reveal some conceptual affinities or similarities between Buddhism and Structuralism. In the introduction we tried to characterize the limit and nature of this work in mentioning the lack of fundamental studies on the whole history of the influence that Buddhism hadd on the French human sciences of the 20th century. We want to make clear that this investigation is not a comparative philosophy in a strict sense. Meanwhile a certain comparativism was executed to find out some analogies in the deep structure of two great roads of human thinking. This article intends to focus on some convergences instead of divergences to examine the metaphysical foundations of two structuralist thinkers, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, in Buddhist philosophy. The author evoked three main themes: emptiness, criticism of self, deconstruction of anthropocentrism.

Neurosémiotique et bouddhisme : dialogue interculturel entre la science et la conscience

Daniel S. Larangé
Buddhism concerns neurosemiotics as part of a dialogue between science and consciousness. The neurosemiotics consider a functional relationship between the representation of the resulting approximation Signifier/Signified and the emergence of a state of consciousness, so that the real way of thinking determines how to live. It follows a paradox of considering fiction preceding reality. It therefore proposes to explain the emergence of meaning from the development of energy fields forming a structure linking tensive mimesis to semiosis through the diegesis. The inquiry’s relation between the observing subject and the observed object integrates data from quantum physics to explain the phenomenon of participation in the reality with which the brain is in connection. So this leads to the question of consciousness organizing itself in a conditioned coproduction. Intercultural dialogue, which reads resonances between the scientific investigations and the Buddhist practice, eventually becomes transcultural insofar as the scientific understanding ultimately originates in the absence of foundation because the universe gradually evacuates the subject and the object that formed it in a complicated semiotic combination of representations of the “I”.

Approche sémiotique exploratoire des paraboles et des images langagières du Su̅tra du Lotus

Anna Ghiglione
This article focuses on the parables and on the imagery of the Chinese version of the LotusSu̅tra, translated from Sanskrit by Kuma̅rajīva in 406. It underlines the semiotic role played by continuous metaphors in this scripture; it interprets them as linguistic signs evoking Buddhahood, namely a dimension that is neither sensible nor intelligible, since it supposes the extinction of all phenomena and the vanishing of all ego-oriented illusions. The author avails herself of the notion of unlimited semiosis and tries to understand which kind of hermeneutical approach is suggested in the text to the receptors (readers, practitioners) in order to reach emptiness and salvation. The perfect and total extinction of suffering actually implies the ontological deconstruction of the causal chain, which presides over not only saṃsa̅ra, but all systems of signs and meanings as well.

Démystification du signe et destruction du sens dans le kōan zen

Simon Kim
Whereas Zazen, the best known form of Zen meditation, aims at annihilating all ties with mundane matters through (seated) meditation, Ko̅an Zen chooses other means to free the mind from such “mundane” attachement: it uses language and communication, but in such a way that it appears absurd and utterly nonsensical (such as “What is the Way?” – “Yes.”). Described as a “special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words and letters,” Ko̅an Zen uses the codes and signs of language only to best demystify and undo its ties to any kind of signified or meaning. By doing so the Zen master intends to free the disciple’s mind from its belief that the signs point to some external reality or to some transcendental truth. It is only when the language is thus demystified that the disciple can come to the realization that there is nothing to be signified – and Zen then talks of vacuity. But vacuity itself is merely a word, another sign, the ultimate achievement lying in the extinction of the mental mind, the generator of all (false) thoughts and discourses. Ko̅an Zen masers would agree with Lacan when he said the world was structured by language, and it is therefore Ko̅an zen’s goal to explode the language and liberate the world (which ultimately does not even exist) from the discursive structure our mind is bound to apply. Only then can the mind become “non-mental (wu-nian)” and realize its true nature (that of Buddhahood).

Wei Zhao

James Partaik

L’habit fait-il le moine ? Sémiotique sociale de « l’être bouddhiste » dans le contexte occidental

Lionel Obadia
This paper aims at exploring a social semiotics of Buddhists. This approach encompasses issues such as the social uses of the signs of “Being Buddhist”, the modes of decoding adherence to Buddhism, by means of exposing behavioral, discursive or clothing signs, within communities of practitioners. These latter are labels by which is traced a frontier between “community” (saṇgha) and the “rest of the world”, and signals embedded in material culture by which religious adherence or belonging are expressed – and easily identified as such in the Asian context. In Western Buddhism, however, these semiotic “decipherings” of religious belongings are much more blurred for two reasons. First, because the ways to relate to Buddhist norms and symbols are malleable. Second, because the ways to display ostensibly or to hide Buddhist signs, usually framed by religious norms, partake of other logics – individualization, schisms, heterodoxy… Based upon ethnographic empirical data, gathered in France and in other national contexts, this paper examines the manners to play with the semiotic codes of belonging to Buddhism, and in conclusion, the ways they disclose the broader issues of adaptation of Buddhism in the West.

Opérations de transformation dans l’iconographie du bouddhisme tibétain

Louis Hébert
Once he interdefines structure, term, relation and operation, the author proposes a fusion of three typologies of transformational operations: those of Groupe µ, Zilberberg and Rastier. Using primarily his metatypology, the author then describes certain aspects of his corpus for analysis. The corpus is made up of some 270 iconographic representations of fantastical beings from Tibetan Buddhism (worldly and enlightened divinities, demons, mythical animals, monsters, etc.). In particular, it appears that the corpus favours addition (and increase), which is sometimes flamboyant, and very often takes a particular form: a reduplication of elements already present in the original form (e.g., extra eyes, arms or legs are appended). However, some beings elude these rules, Kirtimukha, for example, a monster of which it is said that only the head remains, an example of maximum deletion and minimum continuance. This preponderance of a tonic semiotics (additions and increases) over an atonic semiotics (deletions and decreases) somehow contrasts with the core Buddhist notion of emptiness, and the ineffable and generally irrrepresentable nature of ultimate reality.

Empreinte et réincarnation

Benoît Mauchamp
This article addresses the Buddhist concept of reincarnation through notions taken from a “semiotics of print” as it was suggested by Jacques Fontanille in his book titled Soma et Séma (2004). First, the text analyses common features of reincarnation and this specific semiotics, considering the notions of presence and absence, immanence and transcendence, continuity and discontinuity… The article observes then more specifically these aspects in two films, which are a popular fiction by Bertolucci, Little Buddha (1993), and a documentary film by Nati Baratz, Unmistaken Child (2008). Both these films present a similar plot that allows one to reflect, on the one hand, on how the trace of an enlightened being inscribes itself in the signifying substance of a specific body, and to consider, on the other hand, a monk’s quest for (and recognition of) the new manifestation of his deceased master.

Du sens aux sens : les représentations mentales dans l’acte de lecture

Sylvain Brehm
The status of the mental representations during reading was the object of only a few in-depth studies. The founding works in literary theory focus especially on the abstract dimension of these representations. The cognitive sciences, for their part, are also interested in the modalities of the understanding of texts, but do not take into account either their aesthetic dimension or the peculiarity of the act of reading. We suggest establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue to show that the mental representations contain sensory, emotional and abstract constituents.

Images identitaires et rhétorique : la première de couverture de guides touristiques

Montserrat López Díaz
We examine the front pages of tourist guides of France, Spain and Portugal. In the three cases, they are addressed to foreigners. Each territory must convey a specificity and has its own particular characteristics in the absolutely competitive atmosphere of the proliferation of tourist sites. In this way, an identity is constructed by a discourse made with words and icons that are used to reflect the country at issue. So the guide’s front pages provide a special access to a reality, which is pars pro toto reduced to some representations, which become familiar. Therefore we will discuss how these elements construct emblems of identity.

Temps narratif, temps dialectique : une étude d’un panneau de Max Beckmann

Anne Beyaert-Geslin
The text observes how a painting by Max Beckmann, called Tod ([death] 1938) deals with time and how its textuality actually produces this meaning effect. In the context of the thirties, the panel uses Bertold Brecht’s Verfremdung (alienation effect) and keeps its distance from the narrative time of the so called storia. From this point of view, time is a meaning effect due to aspectualization but in this case, this movement is at each stage interrupted and the semantic category called into question. The effect of time is due to the rhythm given by the alternating of known and unknown.