Taking up the call for a "global, practice-centered, and reflexive" philosophy of religion (Schilbrack 2014), this paper is going to develop an intercultural semiotics of cognition, contemplation and compassion in light of the "bedrock of Buddhist praxis": i.e. the trialectic ethics of "moral behaviour" (śīla), "meditative practice" (samādhi) and "(practical) wisdom" (prajñā) (Lusthaus 2002). In keeping with a theosemiotic conception of theology as both a form of inquiry and therapy (Raposa 2020), the need for a radical habit-change in the context of both spiritual and social transformation can be assisted by Buddhist tools for uncovering the psychosophic conditioning and sedimentation of meanings underlying religious systems and social structures, including the supposed incommensurability of (religious, scientific etc.) contexts and cultures (Rosa 2012). When investigating the interpretive habits of a particular community as (normative) frameworks of interpretation (Daniel-Hughes 2018; Slater 2015), related "webs of interlocution" as well as the role of language for the "self in moral space" (Taylor 1989), a Buddhist view allows us to see through the linguistic-cognitive effects of "appropriation" (upādāna). Charles S. Peirce's account of the self as a semiotic process (Colapietro 1989) ties in nicely with a combined Buddhist and systems-cybernetic view on the "co-dependent arising" (pratītyasamutpāda) of self and society (Macy 1991), including a profound mutuality between personal and social transformation. While the paradigm of utilitarian egoism will never give us an adequate understanding of social sympathy and (agapistic) love for its own sake (Pape 1997), Peirce's scientific mysticism (Brier 2008) can accommodate a pragmatically enlarged ecological sense of selfhood (Macy 1995) that rests upon "loving-kindness" (Sanskrit maitrī, Pāḷi mettā) and "the communicative, cooperative possibility of compassion" (karuṇā) (Hayward 1987).