Reversed Siddhartha

What is Pragmatic Dharma?

In case you didn’t notice it, there’s a dedicated subsection with various Pragmatic Dharma texts on the main page of this website.

 

What about the “mushroom culture”?

Here’s a short story shared by Kenneth Folk via his twitter account:

…..In fact, Bill (editor’s note: Hamilton) was himself an unabashed mushroomer, and not only withheld information but advocated doing so. (thread)

When I returned from the IMS 3-month retreat in 1991, Bill told me where he thought I was on the Progress of Insight map. But his policy was to only share mapping information after the fact. In other words, he wouldn’t talk with me about stages I hadn’t yet attained.

When I complained that the IMS teachers hadn’t even been willing to discuss the stages I’d already been through, Bill quipped that they’d treated me like a mushroom, keeping me in the dark and feeding me shit.

While Bill was more forthcoming with information than mainstream American Theravada Buddhist teachers, he was by no means a freedom of information crusader. But to me the presumption, paternalism, and ineffective pedagogy that result from mushrooming were infuriating.

“Mushroom” became my personal shorthand for the culture of secrecy I detested. I raged about it to anyone who would listen, including Daniel Ingram. Daniel hadn’t yet shown much interest in Buddhist meditation, but we were friends and talked often, so he got to hear the rant.

Several years later, when Daniel started sitting retreats, he too got the mushroom treatment, and was as pissed off about it as I was. As he developed his own teaching, he took up the anti-mushroom banner and pushed it further still, going so far as to publicly claim attainments.

Reading Daniel’s book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, one could be forgiven for believing the mushroom critique came from Bill, but it didn’t happen that way. No worries, though, I’m still here to set the historical record straight.

 

Are there any Pragmatic Dharma books to read?

The most famous Pragmatic Dharma book is “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” by Daniel Ingram. Another very popular book is “The Mind Illuminated” by Culadasa.

This website has also an e-book section, dedicated to Pragmatic Dharma. There, among others you will find:

 

What about the “Progress of Insight” Map?

On an old website of mine, MVMR, there was a dedicated sub-section, where I had collected almost everything I found about this map:

Note: For an unknown reason, the above backups from Internet Archive, are not rendered correctly, but the content is still readable.

 

Is Pragmatic Dharma really pragmatic?

No.

There’s a huge difference between what pragmatic dharma is in theory and what it actually is.

While secularism is one of the most important pillars of this contemporary Buddhist movement, most of the popular pragmatic dharma teachers/teachings and practices are tightly connected with very specific traditions and lineages.

Two of the most prominent teachers of Pragmatic Dharma are Daniel Ingram and Kenneth Folk. Both of them had the same teacher, Bill Hamilton. All of them were/are highly influenced by Burmese Theravada and especially the Mahasi Sayadaw’s lineage. All of them spent months/years practicing in traditional monasteries of this tradition/lineage.

Folk’s freestyle noting and Ingram’s fast noting are just contemporary alterations of Mahasi Sayadaw’s Vipassana/noting technique.

Folk’s and Ingram’s interpretations of the Progress of Insight map, are heavily based on the Visuddhimagga (and Mahasi Sayadaw’s study on it).

Both D. Ingram and K. Folk, have taught directly (ex. Ron Crouch, Vince Horn, Abre Fournier etc. are Kenneth Folk’s students) or indirectly (Ingram’s MCTB is probably the most influential text of Pragmatic Dharma) many other famous Pragmatic Dharma teachers.

Although Daniel Ingram, Kenneth Folk, Ron Crouch, Vince Horn, Abre Fournier (and many other less known teachers) are not the only teachers of Pragmatic Dharma, let’s be honest and admit that - especially without the first two - this movement would not even exist. Their influence is huge.

The fact that traditionalists are against Daniel Ingram’s “sect/lineage” does not mean that there’s any “battle” between tradition and pragmatism/secularism. It’s just “pure” against “distorted” tradition - a disagreement between dogmatic people with different points of view.

Of course this doesn’ mean that one won’t find Pragmatic Dharma practitioners or teachers that are different from Daniel Ingram and his followers. It’s just that -based on my experience - it’s very rare.

 

What about Pragmatic Dharma and attainment claims?

What Pragmatic Dharma practitioners call “an open discussion on attainments”, is usually:

or

or

or

Then, someone else, more “experienced”, with “X hundreds or thousands hours of meditation” and a “collection” of 15 retreats will confirm or reject the previous claim.

Another will suggest an increase of meditation hours (from 2 to 3 or 4 or…) plus a modification of the meditation practice or a replacement of it with another, “better” one.

In some cases they will suggest a “famous teacher/coach” (that helped them reach “X path”) who does 1 on 1 sessions (and charges a shitload of money to get people “enlightened”).

What these people have in common is that ALL of them will reject the opinion of another one, who believes there is no-one to get “enlightened” and that this psychological self who craves for “enlightenment” is just a source/cause of neuroticism and suffering.

Then an online battle with follow, “because someone is wrong on the internet” and life will go on.

 

Western Dharma for “Western pockets”

Pragmatic “awakening”/“enlightenment” is (mostly) accessible to people that can afford to pay a lot.

I’ve personally contacted many teachers and below you ’ll find their (most possibly outdated) rates for 1 on 1 sessions:

Recently, I contacted various (pragmatic) non-dual teachers with very similar results:

Notes:

 

What about Pragmatic Dharma and online communities?

Although I already mentioned a various online interactions between Pragmatic Dharma practitioners above, let’s dig a little bit deeper.

Ron Crouch, on his really nice text about Pragmatic Dharma states:

Digital – pragmatic dharma is a sangha in the cloud. There are communities, but they are mostly online communities. Message boards, forums, blogs, podcasts, and other online mediums are the spaces where ideas pop up and are explored…

…and pragmatically minded lay teachers (like myself) often teach people meditation online, via skype or other forms of live online interaction…

…There is something rebellious in spirit about pragmatic dharma that is found in many web-based movements. It is untethered to institutions and traditional hierarchies, and in this sense it is the dharma equivalent of Bitcoin or Wikipedia…

…A decentralized, crowdsourced fund of emerging wisdom and experimentation, that is unpredictable and destabilizing to established approaches. Some of the ideas that come out of it are destined to fail, like so many internet phenomena, but some are very good and deserve to be taken seriously…

to be continued…