01 Meditation Panel Preface.indd - United Nations Day of Vesak 2013

Conference
Figure 3 An English Speaker’s Hallucination
If we take these as examples of the general phenomena of ignorance, which I believe is
correct, one of the most interesting implications that becomes obvious is that ignorance is not just
the active distortion of perception, but it is also at the same time and in exactly the same way, and
imposition of a compulsion on performance. There is no biological reason for these inhibitions of
pronunciation; they are entirely a function of the systemic ignorance imposed upon us by our language.
Figure 4 A Thai Speaker’s Hallucination
In concluding this attempt to convey a sense of how deeply semiotics and linguistics is
related to Buddhism, I would like to point out that the entities that are at work in these last two
examples are not actual sounds, but are abstract categories of sound, dened within a matrix of
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