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Document Details : Title: Phonemes, Words and Sentences, and the Buddhist Unconditioned Author(s): DESSEIN, Bart Journal: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Volume: 93 Issue: 3 Date: 2017 Pages: 413-429 DOI: 10.2143/ETL.93.3.3248504 Abstract : This article focuses on the linguistic concepts of phonemes (vyaÃąjana), words (nāma) and sentences (pada) as part of the atomistic view of reality that was developed by the Sarvāstivādins of Gandhāra, a Buddhist philosophical school that was dominant from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. Their atomistic view of reality not only rendered the world of our mundane experience empty of any self-nature, but had as important consequence that language was thought to be incapable to express true reality. This had important ramifications for the importance of 'verbal authority' that early Buddhists had ascribed to the word of the Buddha. A further development of the atomistic view of reality and its repercussions for the use of language, was that the concept of 'silence' that was already present in early Buddhism came to be an instrument to denote reality and the absolute without actually denoting it. |
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