The Eight Worldly Concerns in Seven Depths

The Eight Worldly Concerns in Seven Depths

Prologue: The Song of the Old Beggar

In the sky-like expanse where nothing has ever been born, the sound of the Dharma arises by itself. Out of that soundless sound came a short song of Nyala Pema Düdul, a few lines only, spoken to a circle of disciples who had asked for it again and again.

In it he names the eight worldly concerns: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity, praise and blame. He declares that whoever still clings to the good and recoils from the bad cannot even be called a practitioner of nondual self-liberation. And then, in a single breath, he opens the entire path: all that arises, delightful or painful, is like the ten similes of illusion. Recognise this, and rest in the expanse of the view, beyond the ordinary mind, beyond words, thought and description, beyond the borders of hope and fear.

He signed it as the old beggar Padma. In 1872 that old beggar dissolved into the body of light, leaving only hair and nails, as the elements of his form returned to their luminous source. From his realisation the stream flowed to Adzom Drukpa, and from Adzom Drukpa it flows on into our lineage. When such a one speaks of the eight concerns, it is not a moralist speaking. It is the voice of the ground itself, in which not a trace of them remains.

The same eight words shine differently at every depth of the path. For the beginner they are a rule of conduct; for the one who trains the mind, a mirror; for the one who investigates, a gateway to emptiness; for the practitioner of Secret Mantra, a maṇḍala; for the yogi of channels and winds, a dance of breath; for the yogi of the Great Perfection, a field of self-liberation; and at the utmost depth, nothing at all: the empty natural radiance of the primordial ground, in which nothing was ever gained and nothing was ever lost.

Each depth does not abolish the one before. It reveals what the one before was already whispering.

I. The Outer Depth: Turning Away from This Life

At the outer depth, the eight worldly concerns are the very weather of an ordinary life. One labours for gain and trembles at loss, runs toward pleasure and away from pain, hungers to be known and fears to be forgotten, drinks praise like honey and swallows blame like ash. There is no great wickedness in this. Yet a human life, rare as a star seen at noon, is poured out into these four pairs and leaves behind nothing but the habit of pouring.

The Noble Nāgārjuna, writing to a king in his Letter to a Friend, named the eight and gave one counsel: hold them as equal, and do not let them become the objects of your mind. He wrote it to a ruler surrounded by riches and flattery, because the eight are not the sickness of the poor alone. They are the air of every world, of the palace as of the village.

In the teaching Mañjuśrī gave in vision to Sachen Kunga Nyingpo, Parting from the Four Attachments, the first line falls like a vajra: whoever is attached to this life is not a practitioner of Dharma. This is the outer sense of Nyala Pema Düdul's warning. A practice undertaken for reputation, for comfort, for offerings or for admiration is still the eight concerns, only wearing robes. The masters of old said that Dharma mixed with worldly aims is food mixed with poison: it looks like nourishment, and it kills.

The Noble Śāntideva, in the sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, examines praise with the calm of a physician. It gives neither merit nor long life, neither strength nor health. When it is lost, the mind wails like a child whose sandcastle has crumbled into the sea. Here the medicine is plain and powerful: the precious human birth, impermanence and death, the unfailing law of karma, the suffering of saṁsāra. These four thoughts turn the mind toward the Dharma and away from the eight.

So the outer practice is renunciation, but it is not grey. It is the relief of one who has seen at last that this game can never be won, and is free, finally, to stop playing it. Such a one still eats, works and meets the world. Only now gain and loss no longer hold the reins of the life.

II. The Inner Depth: The Two Motions of Hope and Fear

At the inner depth one discovers that the eight concerns were never out there. A loss in the world is only an event. Its sting is a movement in the heart. Two people lose the same fortune, hear the same insult, receive the same honour, and wake into entirely different days. Inwardly the eight are only two motions, endlessly circling: hope, which leans toward gain, pleasure, fame and praise; and fear, which shrinks from loss, pain, insignificance and blame.

Here the Great Vehicle turns the eight upside down. In the Eight Verses for Training the Mind, the bodhisattva vows that when others wrong him out of envy, he will take the defeat upon himself and offer the victory to them. This is not contempt for oneself. It is the exact reversal of the ancient habit that wants every gain for me and every loss for you. In the exchange of self and other, the bodhisattva breathes in the defeat, the pain, the blame and the obscurity of all beings, and breathes out to them gain, joy, praise and a good name, like the moon giving away its light to every lake at once.

The Noble Śāntideva goes further still. Whoever blocks my praise, he says, guards me from the lower realms; whoever obstructs my gain cuts the rope that binds me; the enemy who harms me is a treasure appearing in my house, for without him there would be no patience. Seen so, each of the eight becomes a teacher. Loss teaches generosity, pain teaches compassion, obscurity teaches humility, blame teaches patience. Gain, pleasure, fame and praise become offerings to be shared and dedicated the moment they arrive, never hoarded.

The inner practice is a quiet, unbroken watchfulness. One notices the small lift of hope when a message arrives and the small contraction of fear when a name is spoken. One does not fight these movements; one sees them, and seen, they lose their throne. Equanimity is far from coldness. It is the warm and steady heart that no longer needs the world to arrange itself in its favour before it can love.

III. The Innermost Depth: Who Gains, Who Loses?

At the innermost depth of the sūtras the question itself is transformed. It is no longer how to bear loss or how to share gain, but who it is that gains and loses at all. Each of the eight needs a centre: someone to be praised, someone to be blamed, someone to grow rich, someone to be forgotten. Remove that centre, and the eight really have nowhere to fall.

The Mother, the Perfection of Wisdom, searches for this centre and does not find it. The one who is praised is not the body, nor feeling, perception, formation or consciousness, nor anything apart from them. The Noble Nāgārjuna opens his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with eight negations: no ceasing and no arising, no annihilation and no permanence, no coming and no going, no sameness and no difference. It is a perfect mirror. The eight worldly concerns are the eight extremes of the heart, as the eight negations are the extremes of the intellect, and both dissolve together in the single taste of dependent arising.

Look at praise. It is sound, which has no mind. It is another person's pleasure, which belongs to that person. It is a concept in one's own mind, flashing and fading like lightning. The Noble Śāntideva himself makes this analysis: the joy of being praised, examined, has no real connection to anything. Look at gain: it was not mine before, it will not be mine after death, and even now it is held only by a thought. Pleasure and pain arise from causes and conditions and cease when these cease. Nowhere in the eight is there a core.

Yet this emptiness is not a void that swallows the world. Precisely because no one truly gains, compassion for all who suffer under the dream of gaining and losing becomes boundless as the sky. Emptiness and compassion are one taste at this depth. The bodhisattva goes on working, speaking, being spoken of, but now the work is done from spontaneous wisdom, for everyone. The eight concerns, seen through, become the very ground on which an unwounded kindness moves freely in all directions.

IV. The Outer Secret Depth: The Eight Concerns as Maṇḍala

With the Secret Mantra the path takes a step that would be dizzying without emptiness beneath it. The eight concerns are no longer renounced, no longer opposed, no longer merely seen through. They are recognised as pure from the very beginning. The world is the celestial palace, beings are deities, sounds are mantra, and every movement of mind is the play of primordial wisdom.

The practitioner envisions the whole of appearance as the pure realm of the deity. Now gain is no longer a possession; it is an offering already streaming into the maṇḍala, offered onward at once to the deity and to all beings. Loss is the deity's own generosity, clouds of offerings melting back into space. Praise and blame are both the sound of mantra, empty and resounding, neither flattering nor wounding the one who hears them so. Fame and obscurity are the deity's form, arising vivid as a rainbow and dissolving into emptiness, in the rhythm of every sādhana.

This is not a painting laid over an impure world. The tantras teach that impurity was the painting: the habit of seeing gain as mine and loss as yours, praise as sweet and blame as bitter. Pure perception lifts the overlay and shows appearance as it has always been, a maṇḍala that was never built and can never fall. That is why the samaya of the Secret Mantra is never to abandon pure perception. To fall back into the eight is, here, simply to forget the maṇḍala.

So the outer secret practice rides the very energy of the eight. The longing that once ran toward praise becomes devotion to the Root-Guru and the deity. The aversion that once recoiled from blame becomes the blazing clarity of the wrathful ones, cutting the root of self-grasping. What was fuel for saṁsāra becomes fuel for awakening, as the tantras promise: the same poison, held in the hand of wisdom, is the supreme medicine.

V. The Inner Secret Depth: The Winds of Hope and Fear

At the inner secret depth the eight concerns are traced into the Vajra Body itself. The tantras teach that every thought rides on wind, as a rider rides a horse. Hope and fear are not only ideas; they are karmic winds moving in the channels. When the winds course through the right and the left, experience splits in two: self and other, subject and object, gain and loss, pleasure and pain. The eight worldly concerns are this splitting, felt from within.

Therefore the yogas of channels and winds are not a side path to the view; they are the view becoming flesh. Through the practices of tsa lung, the winds are gathered from the side channels into the central channel. As they enter there, abide there and dissolve there, the dualistic thoughts that rode upon them lose their mount. The swing between praise and blame, reaching and recoiling, slows and comes to rest. The yogi does not only understand nonduality; the subtle body itself ceases to manufacture duality.

As the winds dissolve, the bindus melt and descend, and the four blisses dawn, unfolding through the sixteen joys into great bliss inseparable from emptiness. Here pleasure and pain, the most stubborn of the eight, meet their deepest transformation. Ordinary pleasure was always pleasure for someone, chased and then lost. Great bliss has no owner and no opposite; it needs no gain and cannot be harmed by loss. Pain too is met here as wind and essence in motion, and is released into the same unchanging bliss, like a wave falling back into the ocean it never left.

So the inner secret practice cuts the eight at the root of the body. Karmic winds become the streams of wisdom wind; the bodily habit of hope and fear gives way to the natural rest of the central channel. What remains is a body and mind that can be praised or blamed, enriched or impoverished, while the inner wind does not leave its seat.

VI. The Innermost Secret Depth: Self-Liberation

This is the depth from which Nyala Pema Düdul's song is sung. Whoever clings to good and bad, he says, cannot even be called a practitioner of nondual self-liberation. In the Great Perfection the eight concerns are not renounced as at the outer depth, not transformed as in the tantras, not dissolved through the winds. They are left exactly as they are, and they free themselves.

The three statements that Garab Dorje left as his testament hold the whole of it. Introduce directly the face of one's own nature: the Guru points out rigpa, naked awareness, which knows praise and blame and is neither. Decide on this one thing alone: there is nothing other than this awareness, and the eight concerns are its own display. Gain confidence in liberation: whatever arises is freed as it arises. When the thought of gain appears, it is recognised, and in being recognised it is already liberated, like a drawing made on water, vanishing even as it is drawn.

The Omniscient Longchenpa sings in his Treasury of the Dharmadhātu of a mind with nothing to accept and nothing to reject, a sky that has never been touched by its clouds. In that expanse praise need not be refused, for it does not stick; blame need not be endured, for it does not wound. The practitioner of Cutting Through applies no antidote to the eight, since every antidote would be one more hope and one more fear. He simply rests, and in that resting the eight are seen to have been the natural radiance of awareness from the very beginning, the ornaments of the dharmakāya.

This is the meaning of nondual self-liberation. Nondual, because the one who gains and the gain, the one who is blamed and the blame, were never two. Self-liberation, because nothing from outside frees what arises; it frees itself in its own place, in its own moment. The chain of the eight concerns was nothing but the failure to recognise this, and recognition is the whole of the cure.

VII. The Utmost Secret Depth: The Expanse Beyond Hope and Fear

The last lines of the song point beyond even self-liberation. Whatever happens, good or bad, sweet or bitter, is like the ten similes of illusion: a magician's display, a dream, a mirage, a reflection in a mirror, an echo in a canyon, a city of gandharvas in the clouds, the moon in water, a rainbow. Recognise this, the old beggar sings, and rest in the expanse of the view: perfect, beyond the ordinary mind, beyond word, thought and description, beyond the limits of hope and fear.

Here there is no longer a practitioner on one side and the eight concerns on the other, waiting to be liberated. There is only the primordial ground, pure from the very beginning: empty in its essence, luminous in its nature, all-pervading in its compassionate energy. Gain and loss, praise and blame, never departed from this ground, even when they seemed most solid. They were its own light, the five radiances of awareness, mistaken for a world of things to be won and things to be feared. Not recognising its own face, the ground appeared as saṁsāra; recognising its own face, the same ground is Samantabhadra.

The tantras of the Heart Essence speak of the exhaustion of phenomena beyond the mind, where every appearance returns to its source like a rainbow fading into the sky that bore it. At that point the eight worldly concerns are not overcome; they are used up, as a fire ends when nothing is left to burn. Nothing remains to hope for, because nothing is lacking. Nothing remains to fear, because nothing can be lost. This is the perfection the song names, and it is the very perfection that Nyala Pema Düdul made visible when his body itself returned to light.

The ten similes are therefore not a consolation for the disappointed. They are the most exact words language can offer for what is. A dream is vivid and empty; a reflection is clear and without substance; an echo answers, and no one is there. Whoever knows praise and blame in this way does not withdraw from the world. Such a one moves through it as the sun moves through the sky, illuminating everything, touched by nothing.

Epilogue: Not a Single Thought

The song closes with an aspiration. The old beggar Padma prays that his followers, yogis intent on awakening, may be free from even a single thought deceived by the māra of the eight worldly concerns. Not from most such thoughts, not from the coarse ones only, but from a single one.

This is the measure of the whole path. At the outer depth, a single such thought can turn an entire practice into worldly business. At the inner depth, it is a motion of hope or fear, to be seen and turned toward others. At the innermost depth, it is an appearance with no self behind it. At the outer secret depth, it is the deity's own display; at the inner secret depth, a gust of karmic wind returning home to the central channel. In the Great Perfection it frees itself in its own place. And at the utmost depth, it was never anything but the light of the ground.

The one who wrote this called himself a beggar and departed in a body of light. Between these two lies the entire teaching. A beggar has nothing to gain and nothing to lose; a body of light has nothing left that could gain or lose. For those who receive this teaching through the sacred lineage of Adzom Drukpa, the eight worldly concerns are therefore not a small ethical matter at the threshold of the path. They are the path itself, from the first step to the last, and their complete exhaustion is its fruit.

Advice on Abandoning the Eight Worldly Concerns

by Nyala Pema Dündul

Aho!
Hearken well, O fortunate ones,
supreme disciples whose karma is excellent!

Gain and loss, joy and sorrow,
Renown and insignifance, praise and blame —
These are the eight worldly concerns.

Those who cling to the duality of good and bad,
Whose hearts are swayed by delight and dismay,
Can scarcely be called practitioners of nondual self-liberation,
For they remain fettered by the chains
Of attachment to the eight worldly concerns.

Whatever arises, whether it seems good or bad,
Whether it brings delight or sorrow,
Is like the ten similes of illusion. Recognise this!
Rest in the perfection of the natural state,
Beyond the ordinary mind,
Beyond the reach of words, thought and description.
Abide in the vast expanse of the view,
Where hope and fear have no hold.

This counsel on abandoning the eight worldly concerns
Was composed by the old beggar Padma
For a gathering of disciples who had repeatedly entreated him for these words.

Through this virtue, may my followers,
The yogis whose hearts are set upon enlightenment,
Be freed from even the slightest thought
Deceived by the māra of the eight worldly concerns!