What is Pragmatic Dharma?

What happens when you wed ruthless pragmatism & ancient idealism

Feb 13, 2026

What is Pragmatic Dharma?

What is it that we’re doing here?

On one level, it’s just a name—just words. But on another level, it’s a name that points to a specific orientation to practice, a way of approaching meditation, dharma practice, and really the question of what it means to be a human being. In that sense, it strikes right at the heart of what it means to be alive.

For me, the simplest answer to the question is this: doing what works.

That’s Pragmatic Dharma—doing what works.

It’s been super helpful to think about it as the coming together of these two ideas: Pragmatism and Idealism. I’ll have to acknowledge that although I’m kind of interested in philosophy and kind of geeky on that front, I never really read the Pragmatists. And maybe this is a very pragmatic reason for it—I didn’t feel like I needed to. What’s this about? Oh, doing what works? Yeah, I get that. So why read about doing what works? In that sense, I’m a pragmatic poser. But not in the sense that, from the very beginning of my practice career, I haven’t been interested in the question of, “What can I do that’s actually going to work?”

I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t want to fall into some kind of magical cult situation where everyone’s believing absurd things and doing rituals and practices for no good reason. I’ve always been interested in finding out what practices will actually help alleviate some of this suffering, some of this difficulty of being a human being—being alive.

I was very fortunate early on in my practicing career to meet Kenneth Folk as a teacher. I met him through Daniel Ingram, who many of you may know as the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. At the time, Daniel was busy and wasn’t really teaching much, so he said, “Hey, listen, I’m super busy, but I can pass you to a friend I know who really knows this stuff.” I was very lucky to start working with Kenneth in 2005. Several years later, the term Pragmatic Dharma arose in the community we were both part of—the Dharma Overground—which we’d helped start with Daniel. Once that phrase arose and Kenneth identified it as the best way of describing the approach he was taking—and that I was so interested in—it just made sense. On the one hand, there’s this focus on doing what works, the pragmatic aspect. On the other hand, there’s the Dharma.

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The Experimental Ethos

Kenneth often uses the metaphor of mixed martial arts, and I really like it. I don’t watch MMA, but I love the idea behind it: people from different lineages, techniques, and styles coming together and actually testing what happens when those approaches meet in real conditions. What’s fascinating is that, by running that experiment, a whole new hybrid form emerged.

I think of Pragmatic Dharma in the same way. We have all these amazing contemplative traditions and meditative approaches, and here we are trying them out—seeing what actually works. What kind of results do they lead to? Are those the results we want? Are they the results we need? And if not, how do we adapt?

Bruce Lee, who’s often considered a godfather of the modern mixed martial arts movement, developed his own martial form, Jeet Kune Do, in the 1960s, which inspired a lot of what came later. It turns out Bruce Lee was deeply influenced by Daoism and Zen. I came across a quote from him and immediately thought, This could just as easily describe Pragmatic Dharma. He lays out four principles:

Research your own experience.
Absorb what is useful.
Reject what is useless.
Add what is specifically your own.

Research your own experience—that’s meditation. We’re looking directly at what’s happening in our own lives. Absorb what’s useful from teachers, techniques, and traditions. Reject what doesn’t work. Life is short—don’t spend it doing something that isn’t giving you the results you need. And finally, add what is specifically your own. This opens up a different way of seeing ourselves—not just as preservers of tradition, but as innovators.

I once spent time with Ken McLeod, and he asked me a question that really stuck: “What do you preserve?” I gave a joking answer, something about preserving strawberry jam, and he said, “That’s right, you preserve things that are dead.”

Pragmatic Dharma isn’t about preserving dead forms, unless we’re consciously conserving them as a kind of seed bank we might draw from later. There’s value in conservation, but blindly keeping forms alive that no longer function isn’t helpful.

Bruce Lee described Jeet Kune Do this way: “Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms. Since it has no style, it can fit in with all styles. It uses all ways and is bound by none.” You could replace “Jeet Kune Do” with “Pragmatic Dharma,” and it still works:

Pragmatic Dharma favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms. Since it has no style, it can fit in with all styles. It uses all ways and is bound by none.

This is a kind of ruthless pragmatism. Everything is fair game if it serves the end. If something works, use it. If it doesn’t, drop it.

But Works For What?

Here’s an important complication… Doing what works only really makes sense if we ask another question: Works for what?

We can be willing to do anything to get somewhere, but if we never question where we’re going—or whether there might be more than one destination, or more than one way to get there—we create a new problem. For some people, some of the time, Dharma can stand for a bunch of spiritual ideals: perfect enlightenment, perfect skillfulness, completely uprooting greed, hatred, and delusion. There are a lot of very beautiful and also lofty ideals in the Buddhist tradition. And having some idealism is good. We don’t want to just do something that works without considering the ramifications of what we’re doing and why.

So bringing together and wedding pragmatism and dharma is really beautiful. It’s a pragmatic-idealistic approach. There’s both that quality of wanting to find what will actually give us traction in practice and in our lives, and also a sense of not falling into a narrow view about what’s important and why we’re doing this.

There’s a helpful model from the Buddhist wisdom traditions that speaks directly to this question of works for what: The Three Trainings. In Early Buddhism, the Buddha talked about three basic areas of training. We train in morality or ethics, we train in concentration—sometimes translated as meditation—and we train in insight or wisdom. These three domains aren’t completely separable, because they’re all part of one life, but they can be distinguished as different areas of practice with different standards for what works and different outcomes.

Ethics: Living a Good Life

Doing what works in terms of ethics or morality means living a good life and being a good person. You’ve probably heard this before, or maybe even said it yourself: the whole point of this is to be a kinder person, to be a decent human being. There’s something very deeply true about that.

What’s the point if all you do is get really good at meditating and having deep, profound experiences, but then you get up off the cushion and abuse people or take advantage of them? That actually happens sometimes. That’s why these trainings are differentiated. It’s possible to be highly enlightened and still deeply immature in certain ways, where wisdom hasn’t permeated one’s activity in life.

Suzuki Roshi had a great saying: “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, only enlightened activity.” That’s a beautiful pointer.

Doing what works with ethics can take many forms. There are countless ways to become kinder, to have healthier relationships, healthier boundaries, to be a better parent, or to function more skillfully in our professional roles. Dharma traditions have a lot to offer here, and as practitioners we can share what actually works when it comes to living a good life.

Meditation: Many Paths, Many Outcomes

What works in meditation is another question. There isn’t just one kind of meditation. There are many forms and many possible outcomes. In Pragmatic Dharma, practices like noting meditation (vipassana), and deep concentration (jhana), & are often highlighted. They’re very helpful, but we don’t have to stop there.

We can look at other meditative practices and ask, “What works?” Maybe using the breath as a concentration object doesn’t work for you. Maybe another object would. Maybe a technique developed outside the Buddhist tradition could work. We don’t have to be wed to a single tradition. That’s the pragmatic part: if it works, let’s include it—and actually see if it does.

Wisdom: Singular and Multifaceted

Then there’s the question of what works for developing wisdom or insight. It’s important to distinguish meditation from wisdom. Just getting good at entering certain states doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve developed deep wisdom or awakened awareness. It may just mean we’re good at accessing states, which is useful, but not the same thing.

Jack Kornfield, in an article called Enlightenments, writes that the Buddha taught many approaches to enlightenment, all as skillful means to release grasping and return to the inherent purity of consciousness. When consciousness is free of identification with changing conditions—liberated from greed and hate—it’s multifaceted, like a mandala or a jewel. Through one facet it shines as luminous clarity, through another as perfect peace, through another as boundless compassion. Consciousness is timeless, ever-present, empty, and full of all things. When traditions emphasize only one facet, it’s easy to think enlightenment can only be tasted in one way, when in fact it appears in a myriad of beautiful forms.

When we ask what works to develop wisdom, we’re exploring this paradox: awakening appears to be both singular and multifaceted. On the relative level of being human, enlightenment is capable of endless enlargement, and yet there is just one enlightened awareness.

And yet, even here, we have to be honest about the relationship between wisdom and intention. As Sharon Salzberg sometimes says, the Buddha’s enlightenment solved his problem. It doesn’t automatically solve ours.

Different teachers were driven by different questions. The Buddha asked, “What is suffering, and how does it end?” Ramana Maharshi asked, “Who am I?” Those aren’t the same questions, and they led to very different methods. When people come to me and say they want stream entry, I often ask a follow-up question: What do you want from stream entry? Usually, the deeper answer has nothing to do with stream entry itself. It’s a strategy, not the real aim. This is why many people are disappointed when they attain what they were chasing—it doesn’t deliver what they actually wanted.

There’s a Tibetan saying: Everything rests on the tip of intention.

Intention matters because it changes over time. When I became a parent, my relationship to practice shifted dramatically. I wasn’t aiming for deep retreat states anymore. I wanted to be kind, present, and not lose my temper. That change in intention reshaped everything about how I practiced.

As practice unfolds, we often move into new phases while still carrying old motivations that no longer fit. This is especially common around disillusionment phases, when what used to drive us—often a sense that something is missing—stops working. At that point, we need to reset our compass.

I think of practice like riding a bicycle. You might have a general sense of direction, but once you’re moving, conditions constantly change. You steer dynamically. You adjust in response to what’s happening.

Pragmatic Dharma is like that. It’s a continuous feedback loop: We practice. We see what happens. We honestly assess the results. We check back in with our intention. And then we adjust.

For Whom Does It Work?

Another aspect of doing what works is asking: for whom does it work? We’re not all the same. We share the same basic biological hardware, but we also have real differences. Pragmatic Dharma is open to the question of skillful means—what works for this person, with these tendencies?

Through practicing social meditation, a technique Kenneth developed, I began extending meditative awareness into relationship. I noticed that some people tend to be more self-focused, while others are more other-focused. I realized how self-focused I can be—how absorbed I get in my own experience.

For me, doing what works often means focusing more on others. Parenting has been very effective in that way. Pro-social practices like metta and heartfulness have also worked well for me. Someone who is more other-focused might benefit from practices that emphasize turning back toward themselves.

Ken Wilber once joked that in Tibetan Buddhism, where there are practices involving a hundred thousand prostrations, people who are already other-focused might be better served by doing a hundred thousand stand-ups—asserting their own presence and authority instead.

So Pragmatic Dharma recognizes that different—and even opposite—practices may work for different people.

An Appropriate Response

And then there’s the question of what works when, and where. One of the things I’ve most appreciated learning from Kenneth and from Zen is the idea of contemplative fluency—being fluent in different modes of practice, like speaking different languages. With practice, can we become fluent in our own experience at every level—from basic sensory experience to abstract thought? Can we know what level of response is appropriate right now?

Over time, even our deepest questions can change. Early on, I was obsessed with the question, What is true? Ten years later, that question barely made sense to me anymore. More and more, the inquiry becomes simpler and more immediate.

In Zen, there’s a famous koan where a student asks, “What is the highest and most profound teaching of all the Buddhas?” The answer is: “An appropriate response.”

Ultimately, that’s what Pragmatic Dharma is about. It’s the Buddhist idea of skillful means—upaya. It’s about learning how to respond to an unfolding reality that is timeless and ever-present, yet constantly emerging. And we are part of that evolutionary unfolding.