10. Conclusion

As the chapter title brought out, this chapter has sought to present the critical background and review of the reference of language and meaning in the Five Nikāyas, and a brief critique of their conceptual and religious foundations. Thus, as carried out above, the chapter has dealt with ten major sections including the preliminary and the present one.

The first one has discussed the generally philosophical and linguistic study on meaning. As shown, in philosophy of language, the study of linguistic meaning is center. This section has also sought to sectionize systematically.

The second section has presented and discussed the theories of meaning and their major concerned issues. According to most contemporary theorists of meaning that knowing the meaning of a sentence is not the same as knowing an object. In their opinions meaning consists in having a complex set of abilities which are manifested in the appropriate use of the sentence in question. Philosophical theories of meaning, as Locke’s view, are ideas in the head; the picture theory that sentences, as the early Wittgenstein’s view, are pictures of facts with which they share a form; the use theory that as the later Wittgenstein’s view to ask after the meaning of an expression often is to ask about its use; psychological or communicative-intention theories as Grice’s programme to reduce the meanings of sentences to the intentions of speakers uttering them via a notion of speaker meaning; truth-conditional semantics; inferentialist semantics which identifies meaning with inferential role; verification and assertibility theories that the meaning of a sentence, as the logical positivists’ view, is given by its method of verification, and Dummett’s account in terms of the conditions in which one is warranted in asserting the sentence in question.

The third section has focused on discussing the semantics in which paradigmatically a formal semantics for a fragment of a natural language consists first in assignments of semantic value to various subsentential portions of the language, such as objects to names and extensions to predicates, and truth functions to various operators. Next, the semantic theory provides interpretations for complex sentences relative to a time, possible worlds and index. More specifically, formal semantics is the discipline that employs techniques from symbolic logic, mathematics, and mathematical logic to produce precisely characterized theories of meaning for natural languages or artificial languages. The section has furthermore discussed the Two-Dimensional Approaches, and other rules and semantic conditions.

The fourth section has dealt with and discussed the sense which as Frege held is as a criterion of identification of a reference.

The fifth section has discussed and analyzed the Grice on speaker’s-meaning and sentencemeaning.

The sixth section has specially presented and discussed the distinctive issues reflected in the Five Nikāyas as well as dealt with some essential Buddhist terms such as the Dhamma the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Thirty-senven Aids of Enlightenment, The Four Noble Persons, The Four Four Jhānas and the Four Arūpajjhānas, the Nibbāna, and so on.

The seventh section has studied the contexts of language and meaning with the four important issues presented in the Five Nikāyas.

As section eight brought out, the Buddha professes himself only to be a teacher who with compassion shows the way to his disciples and followers. He has never accepted the idea that man can get salvation by merely believing and learning in someone or the supreme. And he has never claimed himself as any divine status or a personal savior. The eighth section has dealt with and discussed the Faith and the Truth.

Section nine has sought to mention and examined as well as discussed the methodological characteristics of the Five Nikāyas. Generally speaking, the formats of discourses in the Five Nikāyas are greatly multiform and diversified. Many metaphors, similes and a lot of rhetoric were skillfully used by the Buddha to explain the puzzle questions persuasively. This section has particularly presented and discussed various scientific methods stated and applied by the Buddha as reflected in the Five Nikāyas such as the Approach of Adaptation (§3.9.3), the Illustrative Approach (§3.9.4), the Analytical Approach (§3.9.5), the Experimental Approach (§3.9.6), the Silent Approach (§3.9.7), specially the stylistics, rhetoric, and so on.

The chapter in all attempts has presented and discussed the language and meaning and their concerns, particularly the theorems which specify the meanings of each sentence in that language in a way that displays how these meanings depend on the meanings of its parts. More specifically, the Buddha’s teachings/language taught in the Five Nikāyas relate closely to the metaphors, the metonymies, particularly the similes, the implicature, and so on in order that his disciples according to their ability can understand those Dhammas, and practice them in conducing to the liberation, and enlightenment. In the next, the kernel study of this research work, the chapter four will take an attempt to focus on examining and analyzing as well as discussed in great detail the philosophy of language in the Five Nikāyas.