ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Owen Flanagan’s critique of Buddhist conceptions of the “luminosity of mind.” The author argues that, while Flanagan’s confrontation with the Dalai Lama’s views makes it seem like the difficulties being raised in it are about the fraught mind-body dualist problem, a survey of important traditional Buddhist sources on luminosity may indicate that this is not the case. Classical Buddhist texts in the Vijnanavada, Huayen, and Chan traditions largely formulate mental luminosity as either a feature of a certain contingently produced enlightened awareness or as a natural causal condition of its own kind for the possibility of enlightenment. While the current Dalai Lama may be invoking this traditional conceptual vocabulary in sometimes slightly imprecise ways in order to resist modern varieties of physicalist reductionism, classical Buddhist philosophers appeared to believe that such “luminosity” was itself a component of a causally conditioned natural order. The author wishes to demonstrate that any confrontation between Buddhist conceptions of the “luminosity of mind” and contemporary physicalist conceptions of awareness represents a confrontation between two different frameworks for comprehending the causal and natural order, and not one between Buddhist dualism on one side and Western naturalism on the other.
