The Bodhisattva's Brain : Buddhism Naturalized

281 Pages·2011·0.647 MB·English

by  Flanagan, Owen J

The Bodhisattva’s Brain

The Bodhisattva’s Brain
Buddhism Naturalized
Owen Flanagan
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flanagan, Owen J., 1949–
The Bodhisattva’s Brain : Buddhism Naturalized / Owen Flanagan.
p. cm
“A Bradford Book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01604-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Buddhism—Psychology. 2. Buddhist philosophy. I. Title.
BQ4570.P76F48 2011
294.3’3615—dc22
2010053617
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Betty Stanton, and the memory of Harry “Bradford” Stanton, who
made comparative neurophilosophy, and much else, possible

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Buddhism Naturalized 1
I An Essay in Comparative Neurophilosophy
1 The Bodhisattva’s Brain 9
2 The Color of Happiness 37
3 Buddhist Epistemology and Science 59
II Buddhism as a Natural Philosophy
4 Selfless Persons 93
5 Being No-Self and Being Nice 115
6 Virtue and Happiness 165
Postscript: Cosmopolitanism and Comparative Philosophy 203
Notes 209
References 237
Index 249

Preface
This book is the unintended consequence of an accident. In the summer
of 1999, while on a working vacation in Costa Rica finishing Dreaming
Souls (2000b), I received an email inviting me to participate in a weeklong
discussion the following March in Dharamsala, India, with the 14th Dalai
Lama and a handful of scientists and philosophers on the topic of “destruc-
tive emotions.” Prior to the invitation I had some curiosity and a bit of
knowledge about Buddhism, as well as a strong conviction of the worth of
comparative philosophy, reasoning that either there was or wasn’t wisdom
about the human condition, and that studying different, and if possible
unrelated traditions, would reveal which it was, and if there was any, what
it is. The invitation to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala was, I
was told, due to a positive impression my book on the nature of conscious-
ness, Consciousness Reconsidered (1992), specifically its defense of the use of
first-person phenomenology in a robust naturalistic theory of conscious-
ness, had made on several of the Dalai Lama’s scientific acquaintances
(there was no reason then or now to think that the Dalai Lama himself had
read any of my work).
The meeting, the Eighth Mind and Life Conference in the spring of 2000,
led to a certain unexpected visibility for the participants, including myself,
since ideas hatched at the meeting (not by me) led immediately to some
widely discussed neuroscientific experiments attempting to determine
whether, or possibly to demonstrate that, Buddhist brains revealed their
owners to be unusually happy. Because I had been present at the original
discussions of whether Buddhism—specifically certain kinds of Buddhist
meditation practices—might produce positive changes in the hearts and
minds of practitioners, I was immediately and frequently asked to speak
and write about the results of these experiments, which according to the
media, more than the scientists involved, showed that Buddhism, uniquely
perhaps among the world’s great wisdom traditions, might produce what