Buddhism and Structuralism, It's All Relative

I was having a lot of trouble deciding what I was going to write about for this prompt, that was until I read a couple of other blogs, so thanks you guys. It's funny, I'm kind of superstitious, and I just made a wish on an eyelash that I would have an amazing revelation and be able to write this blog, it turns out my wish came true. You can decide if that was God messing with me or just a coincidence.

Now, as for structuralism, I am going to look at the quote, "Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position." I was having trouble connecting this quote with my thoughts on structuralism until I looked up the word "intrinsic" (I have an extremely limited vocabulary, it's sad, but I'm working to change that). Now I can comfortably say that, Saussure means that words (and the concepts that go along with those words) do not get there meaning from their native/natural being, but instead get meaning through their relative position in the language system. As I mentioned in class, this immediately reminds me of what I know of the Buddhist religion. Keep in mind I just started studying Buddhism this week, but from what I understand, Buddha's teachings, also know as the Dharma, state that no person holds meaning within oneself, we get our meaning through every other living thing. We are relative beings. We can not be released from Samsara (the cycle of reincarnation) until we accept the fact that we are not an individual but actually part of a system, and that system is what gives us our meaning, or defines us. That is an extremely spiritual way of looking at Saussure, I don't know if that will help anyone else understand what he means, but it helps me.

Another good example of this idea, is found in the "hut" example that everyone else has been talking about. I won't go into too much detail about it, because you can just read about it in Beginning Theory (Barry). But the gist is, the word "hut" doesn't have meaning on its own, it gets it meaning through words with similar value like "house" and "shack." If the word "hut" did not exist then its meaning would just be absorbed into the surrounding words. Hopefully, the example given in class about the tree also helps you understand this concept too.

I think this feeds into the other ideas that Saussure presents, like "the bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary" (as I'm sure it should), which explains that words have nothing to do with their partnering concepts. I know I am only supposed to talk about one of the quotes, but I think my understanding of these two quotes coincide, so it may do the same for other people.

I can't wait until I have to tackle Poststructuralism/Deconstructionism, Buddhism talks about decentralizing too!