Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and defamation, praise and blame, these eight worldly concerns are what ordinary people care about most. However, they are huge impediments for spiritual seekers whose job is to see them as essence-less as the banana tree and to give up on them. In A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life it says:
When all things are devoid of true existence, what is there to gain, and what to lose? Who can be honored or humiliated by whom?
From where can pain and pleasure arise, what can be liked and what loathed? When examined as to its true nature, who is craving, what is there to crave?
Upon analysis of this world of living beings, who will die in it? Who will come to exist? Who has existed? And who, indeed, are relatives and friends?
May beings like myself realize that everything is just like space!
To attain a high level of realization, one must eliminate clinging to all external objects and realize the emptiness in self and all phenomena. It is only then one becomes firmly unshakable by the eight worldly winds.
Once, Dromtonpa’s followers at the Serdung Valley sought him out for teachings. He asked his disciple Jixiang Zizai (Auspicious Ease) to go instead: “I am now practicing on renouncing the secular world, should I head out, it would be a disservice to my practice.” Staying put, he wore nothing but tattered clothes covered with patches, often he took off the upper garment and threw it over his back, with two sleeves hanging over his shoulders. Sometimes he disappeared into the pinewoods, at other times he leaned against his rattan cane for breaks. Often he recited the verses in Letter to a Friend: “Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and defamation, praise and blame, see them as the eight concerns of the secular world. To pacify your mind, abandon them all.” Sometimes he murmured to himself: “Being the one seeking liberation, I am not bound by fame, power, money, or gain.” He would finish the whole verse, but many times he entered meditative absorption when he was only halfway through or barely at the beginning.
His unique instruction to his disciples was: “Chase not after the eight worldly concerns in this brief human life.” His main disciple Chengawa took this teaching to heart and practiced most tenaciously, forbearing adversities and braving the elements. Finally Chengawa subdued the eight worldly concerns and reached the state of “no lightning thunderbolt can shock his concentration; no scorching flame can inflict his mind.”
