Pragmatic Buddhism at Unfettered Mind is about effective methods of practice:
- effective ways to build skills and abilities,
- effective ways to instill, uncover, or open to deeper understandings, and
- effective ways to live practice in your life.
Pragmatic Buddhism is about the tools, understandings, and experience you need to meet the challenges you may face in your spiritual journey. It does not mean merely using Buddhist perspectives and methods to resolve problems in your life.
While one of the effects of practice may be the resolution of various problems, another effect may be the compounding of such problems to the point that you have to make radical changes in your life.
One aim of pragmatic Buddhism is to provide you with ways to develop the skills and capabilities you need to meet such challenges.
Pragmatic Buddhism is grounded in the bodhisattva vow. This is where it starts. As it is presented in the Diamond Sutra, the bodhisattva vow is the intention to free beings from the vicissitudes of samsara without ever conceiving them as beings. Compared to how compassion is usually understood, this is a compassion of a completely different order — the union of compassion and emptiness.
Pragmatic Buddhism is based in traditional Mahayana and Vajrayana and their time-tested methods of practice that include:
- The development of stable attention, insight, and the uncovering of direct awareness;
- Mahayana mind-training including loving kindness, compassion, taking and sending (tonglen), the six perfections including the perfection of wisdom, and the Great Middle Way;
- Vajrayana practice, including teacher union, deity creation and completion, energy transformation, and protector practice.
Pragmatic Buddhism means that you are resourceful and practical. Its motto might be “I don’t do what I know does not work.”
In every generation teachers have enhanced, combined, and distilled the practices they received from their their teachers to meet the particular situations of the times. This willingness to be creative and innovative applies not only to methods or practice, but also to the translation of texts, the integration of prayer and meditation, how students and teachers meet to talk about practice experience, the formats of retreats, the rituals and ceremonies that support practice, and the skillful use of technology.
