Semiotical Analysis of Dharma

Abstract

In the history of the studies of Indian thought, most researches about the concept of dharma have taken one of two paths: either to study the concept by choosing one of its senses, restricting only to its analysis, or taking into consideration the polysemy of the word, simply pointing it out and indicating the various meanings. With no depreciation to the contributions made to the studies undertaken so far, this text aims to present an alternative to the comprehension of such concept, by addressing the matter from another theoretical perspective: using not philology, logic or history of thought, but the theoretical apparatus offered by semiotics. This essay presents a brief context of the historical moment when these texts were written. We then proceed to an analysis of the texts, aiming at the comprehension of the modelization and modalization functions produced by the dharma in the Indian culture of the Epic-Brahmanic period. For the analysis, the corpus used was comprised of texts from the Sutta Pit .aka, an anthology of texts of the Theravada Buddhism, and the ¯ Bhagavad-G¯ita¯, one of the most important texts of the orthodox Brahmanism. Both texts were written in a period of the Indian history called Epic-Brahmanic, one of the greatest cultural production periods in India, when some of the most important texts of this country’s thoughts were written, texts that have some influence in its culture even nowadays.