The book is about learning. And living. Learning occurs within the flow of living, and living is the flow from within which signs emerge. Within the flow, we appropriate signs for the purpose of learning and living and communicating. In another manner of putting it, semiosis lives, and we live semiosis, semiosis is life, and life is living semiosis. Which is to say that semiosis is the way of all signs; it is the Buddha in the sign.
The book, then, offers a radical interpretation of Charles S. Peirce by placing his concept of the sign within certain facets of Buddhist philosophy. In so doing, it subverts the classical principles of Bivalence or Binarism, Identity, Noncontradiction, and Excluded-Middles. These principles eventually give way to the notion of Incongruous Complementarity, subtly evinced through Peirce's writings and Buddhist philosophy, and implied in Niels Bohr's interpretation of the quantum world.
F. Merrell is professor of semiotics, literary theory, and Latin American literatures and cultures at Purdue University. His most recent books include Signs for Everybody (Legas Press, 2000), Signs, Science, SelfSubsuming Art(ifacts) (Thelem Press, 2000), Tasking Textuality (Peter Lang, 2000), Simplicity and Complexity (University of Michigan Press, 1998), Sensing Semiosis (St. Martin's Press, 1998), Peirce, Signs, and Meaning (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
