Abstract

In The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, Owen Flanagan undertakes a project of what he calls ‘cosmopolitan philosophy’, with an aim to develop and interrogate a naturalized Buddhism. A project of naturalization requires a conception of naturalism that can serve as a hermeneutic and philosophical standard against which certain things may be judged naturalistically acceptable or unacceptable. On Flanagan’s account, Buddhism ‘naturalized’ is primarily a Buddhism, “without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus-pocus.” Instead, he sets out to sketch a version of Buddhism (or a new view inspired by it) that is consistent with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and scientific materialism, including ‘neurophysicalism’ or the view that “mental events are brain events.” However, classical Buddhist philosophers rejected materialism on philosophical, not merely dogmatic, grounds. In contemporary terms, Buddhist philosophers saw that phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, and mental causation present serious problems for materialism. So, rather than dismissing Buddhist anti-materialist accounts of mind as simply ‘hocus-pocus’, in this chapter takes up the question of whether and how these views might inform a naturalistic Buddhist philosophy. The question, then, is whether a naturalistic Buddhism requires some form of neurophysicalism. It is argued that it does not, by way of examining two distinct versions of naturalistic, but non-physicalist accounts of consciousness reconstructed from the Indian Buddhist tradition. The first, drawing on the work of Dharmakīrti, is a form of trope dualism. The second, drawing on the work of Śāntarakṣita, is a form of pragmatic pluralism that gives a central place to consciousness. And while these two accounts are distinct, and in some important respects incompatible, what they have in common is the idea that consciousness is both non-physical and fully natural.