Fehlwörter: On the Structural Necessity of Semantic Failure in Buddhist Key Terms

This paper introduces the concept of Fehlwort (pl. Fehlwörter) – a word that struc-turally must miss its referent, where the failure to denote is not a deficiency but theoperative function. Central Buddhist terms such as Buddha, Nirvāṇa, and Maitreyaare analysed as Fehlwörter: each points toward that which cannot be captured inlanguage, and each necessarily fails – yet it is precisely this failure that constitutestheir communicative power. While existing Buddhist and Sanskritic metalinguis-tic concepts – paññatti/prajñapti, saṃvṛti, upāya – approach aspects of the problem,none captures the specific structural claim that the word’s missing its target is itsfunction. A closing section develops a generative model of transmission – seed,unfolding rule, apparatus – drawn from the dynamics of Julia sets, in which theFehlwort appears as the invariant of communication: the one class of words whosecharacteristic mode of failure survives the change of apparatus. The paper arguesthat the concept of Fehlwort fills a genuine terminological gap in Buddhist philoso-phy of language and offers a tool for re-reading the tradition’s persistent suspicionof its own vocabulary.