On Minds, Dharmakīrti and Madhyamaka. 1 Tom J.F. Tillemans §1. The problem. Do Buddhists have a view of mind they can plausibly defend in current philosophical debates often dominated by forms of materialism? In recent years the XIVth Dalai Lama and a number of scientists have been meeting regularly in Dharamsala, India, to discuss and compare Buddhist and modern psychological, or cognitive science, approaches to the nature of mind. And no doubt the most difficult problem they have taken up—one which potentially significantly divides Buddhists from many major contemporary Analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists— is the question of physicalism, i.e., the view that all that there is is physical in nature or can be thoroughly explained in terms of the physical sciences. 2 The rather extreme version of physicalism that I will take up here is that of the Canadian philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland. They do not try to show that mind and brain are somehow identical entities, but argue instead that mind and the mental are just pseudo-entities accepted in "folk theories," pseudo-entities that can and (at least in the Churchlands' estimation of things) probably will end up being eliminated by better science. This stark version of the position that all is only material has a certain type of rigor appealing to the tough-minded who advocate facing facts without old notions that obfuscate. It is in one way or another taken seriously by many who would invoke science as the best or only source of knowledge. It merits attention in an East-West discussion, even if there are arguably other more sophisticated physicalisms on the market. Last but not least, it is the version of physicalism that figured in a round of the Dharamsala discussions. As Patricia Churchland participated in those discussions, what I have to say can be seen as a continuation of a contemporary comparative philosophy dialogue that has already begun and where positions have already been staked out. 3 It's time to re-examine how the Buddhists could best proceed in that debate. They may well have been betting on the wrong arguments and have more promising ways to defend mind in their philosophy. §2. Dharmakīrti. Let us first briefly go back to the Indian canonical sources to be clear on the main historical antecedents for a contemporary East-West debate on physicalism. For the Buddhist side, the physicalist school against which they (and other Indians) argued vociferously was the Cārvāka, a school that no doubt was perceived as threatening, although we have no clear image of its actual situation in India, or its institutions and the number of its adherents. Indeed we have almost nothing remaining of the Cārvāka's own writings, apart from a few fragments