Content area
Full Text
Abstract: The Buddhist symbolism is mostly focused on a few distinctive elements that basically aim at the transgression from their physical significance to the abstract embodiment of the "law" (dharma) they stand for. The elements considered here are those related to the four principal events of the Buddha's life: the lotus, the Bodhi tree, the Dharma- wheel, and the stupa. Eliade's understanding of these particular Buddhist symbols and on his interpretation is also considered.
Keywords: symbolic representation, Buddhist symbols, Mircea Eliade, lotus, Bodhi tree, Dharma, stupa.
1. Symbolic representations in Buddhism
1.1. On the meaning of symbolic representations
The word "symbol" derived and distorted from its usual Greek meaning, signifying a sign of recognition or password, has become synonymous with the representation of a concept by a conventional sign.
Every culture has its own conception of symbolism, as do various groups of philosophers, historians and sociologists. Many of the theories used to explain and understand them are contradictory, and some people, such as the anthropologist Dan Sperber, have doubted that it is possible even to define symbolism. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) attempted to put together a typology of symbols that includes such elementary, "natural" forms as the icon and the image, using the term "symbol" to refer to "arbitrary signs" functioning within a complex communication system. Conversely, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) employed the word "symbol" to refer only to "predetermined signs". For Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, symbolism is "the art of thinking in images", an art now lost to civilized man, notably in the last three hundred years, perhaps in consequence of the "catastrophic theories of Descartes", to quote Schneider. Coomaraswamy, then, shares the views of Erich Fromm, and of Bayley, explicit in the titles of their respective works: The Forgotten Language of Symbolism. However, this loss - as anthropology and psychoanalysis have shown - is limited to consciousness and not to the "unconscious", which, to compensate, is perhaps now overloaded with symbolic material. Fromm, steering his course along the normal channels of symbolic knowledge, lays down three kinds of symbols which are different in degree: (a) the conventional, (b) the accidental, (c) the universal. The first kind comprises simple acceptance of a constant affinity stripped of any optical or natural basis: for example,...