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. Classical Buddhist philosophers, however, 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’, this chapter takes up the question of whether and how these views might inform a naturalistic Buddhist philosophy. The question 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 Dharmakirti, is a form of trope dualism. The second, drawing on the work of Santaraksita, is a form of pragmatic pluralism that gives a central place to consciousness. 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.
