The Eight Worldly Winds (Lokadhamma)

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 October 2026

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The eight worldly winds are the eight worldly conditions (Pali lokadhammā) of the Pali discourses: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, pleasure and pain. In AN 8.5 the Buddha says they revolve around the world. In AN 8.6 he adds that the ordinary person and the noble disciple meet all eight alike; what differs is that the disciple stops favouring the pleasant four and opposing the unpleasant four.

“Worldly” is the loka of the Pali term (and of Chinese 世法 and Tibetan ‘jig rten chos). “Winds” is the image of the Chinese name 八風, which Chinese texts also write 世間八風, “the eight winds of the world”; 84000’s glossary gives a matching Tibetan rlung brgyad. Among the Pali texts on this page, wind comes in only at Dhammapada 81, and there it blows on blame and praise alone. Who first used the English phrase we have not established. This page, part of the core teachings of Buddhism, gives each tradition’s list in its own source’s order.

The eight, in the order the Pali gives them

AN 8.5 names four pairs. Three run pleasant-then-unpleasant; the third runs the other way, nindā ca, pasaṁsā ca, “blame and praise”.

Yaso is not the same as praise. The Pali Text Society dictionary glosses it “glory, fame, repute, success, high position”, and reports that the Pali commentator Dhammapāla took it mainly as a great retinue of servants and followers. Pasaṁsā is praise itself.

The last word is dukkha, the four noble truths’ word for suffering; here it is simply the painful. Three points about order matter before you quote the list.

• Blame before praise. The list puts blame first in AN 8.5, AN 8.6, DN 33 and DN 34. Yet AN 8.6’s own prose flips the pair when it says the ordinary person favours “praise” and opposes “blame”, and the Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga and the Sarvāstivāda Mahāvibhāṣā (both below) put praise first too. Many popular English lists, including our page on Dhammapada 81, say “praise and blame”. Both orders are in the texts.
• Fame before disgrace, mostly. The Pali on SuttaCentral reads yaso ca, ayaso ca, and Sujato and Ṭhānissaro follow it. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation of AN 8.5 and AN 8.6 reads “disrepute and fame”. We have not checked whether his Pali edition differs.
• Pleasure and pain last. The lists below from the Tibetan tradition (Nāgārjuna’s Indian Letter as Alexander Berzin translates it, and Nyala Pema Dündul) move this pair to second place; the Chinese Āgamas keep it last but put suffering first, while the Mahāvibhāṣā keeps the Pali’s pleasure-then-pain.

AN 8.5: the world revolves around them

The first discourse is only the list and a verse. It opens with the image the teaching hangs on:

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu has them “spin after the world” (AN 8.6). The closing verse, repeated in AN 8.6:

The verse speaks of the desirable (iṭṭha) and the undesirable (aniṭṭha); a Chinese treatise below sorts the eight explicitly into four favourable and four adverse.

AN 8.6: the same eight, two responses

AN 8.6 repeats the list and then puts the question that makes it a teaching. An unlearned ordinary person, the Buddha says, “encounters gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, and pleasure and pain. And so does a learned noble disciple.” What is the difference?

The ordinary person, meeting gain, does not reflect that it is “impermanent, suffering, and perishable” (anicco dukkho vipariṇāmadhammo; see anicca), and so with all eight. The eight “occupy their mind”; they favour the pleasant and oppose the unpleasant, and are “not freed from suffering”. The disciple’s reflection is given in the first person:

The text runs the same reflection through all eight, ending with “I’ve encountered this pain”, and then concludes:

The Pali pair behind “favoring and opposing” is anurodha and virodha. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, who titles the discourse the Lokavipatti Sutta, “The Failings of the World”, has the ordinary person who “welcomes the arisen gain and rebels against the arisen loss”.

Some modern teachers call this response equanimity (upekkhā, the same word as the last of the four brahmavihāras). Alexander Berzin, for one, writes that equanimity at these experiences “does not mean feeling nothing”, nor suppressing feelings. AN 8.6 itself does not use the word: what it describes is a person who has given up favouring and opposing (anurodhavirodhavippahīno, AN 8.6:6.6).

The text does not promise the disciple fewer losses or less blame: the eight still arrive. And its “freed from suffering” is a claim about liberation from “rebirth, old age, and death”, not a promise that a reflection will make a bad day feel better. How the discourse reads against likes and follower counts is on Buddhism and social media.

Where else the eight appear in Pali texts

Where the discourses of the Pali Canon spell the list out (AN 8.5, AN 8.6, DN 33, DN 34), it runs in the same order; AN 10.27 names the set without listing it. Three verse texts allude to it without listing it in full, the Abhidhamma reorders one pair, and the commentaries gloss it.

• DN 33, “Reciting in Concert”. Sāriputta, asked by the Buddha to give the mendicants a Dhamma talk, sets out teachings for them to recite in concert and includes “eight worldly conditions” among the eights; the Buddha concurs at the end.
• DN 34, “Up to Ten”. Also Sāriputta’s. Right after the eightfold path, the eight things to be developed, comes “What eight things should be completely understood? Eight worldly conditions” (pariññeyyā).
• AN 10.27, “The Great Questions”. The eight answer “eight things”: a mendicant “completely disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed regarding” them “makes an end of suffering in this very life”.
• Snp 2.4. The Maṅgala Sutta counts it the highest blessing when a mind “touched by worldly conditions” does not tremble.
• Dhammapada 81. The rock the wind cannot stir, and the blame and praise (nindāpasaṁsāsu) that blow on it, belong to Unshaken like a rock.
• The Abhidhamma. The Vibhaṅga’s chapter on minor items lists a “deflection of consciousness” in the eight worldly conditions and defines it as “infatuation with gain, hostility to absence of gain” and so on through all eight, praise before blame (trans. U Thittila). On that literature see Abhidharma.
• The Cariyāpiṭaka. Its last poem, on equanimity, closes with four of the eight: “In gain and loss, fame and disgrace, / respect and contempt, / having become equal in every case” (Cp 35:14, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). See the ten perfections.
• The commentaries. The Pali Text Society dictionary reports the Khuddakapāṭha commentary (KhA 153) explaining the Maṅgala verse’s worldly conditions as things that do not cease while the world goes on.

Two near-misses. AN 8.7’s eight that overwhelmed Devadatta (gain, loss, fame, disgrace, honour, dishonour, corrupt wishes, bad friendship) are a different list. And in SN 22.94 the singular lokadhamma is a “worldly phenomenon”, and its examples are the aggregates, starting with form.

In Chinese: from “worldly dharmas” to “eight winds”

The Chinese Āgamas keep the eight as 世八法 or 世間八法, “eight worldly dharmas”, in an order of their own: 利、衰、毀、譽、稱、譏、苦、樂. Gain (利) and decline (衰) come first, as in the Pali; suffering (苦) and pleasure (樂) come last, suffering first. The Dīrgha Āgama’s parallel to DN 34 (DA 10) makes them the eight things to be understood (八覺法). The Ekottarika Āgama’s parallel to AN 8.5 (EA 43.8) has them turning with the world (隨世迴轉), but has no verse and no noble disciple: the Buddha tells the monks to seek a means to get rid of these eight (當求方便，除此八法). The glosses of the Chinese here are ours.

In the Āgama list the middle four do not line up neatly with the Pali. The Buddhabhūmi-sūtra-śāstra (佛地經論, Xuanzang, 649), which keeps the Āgama order, makes 毀 disparagement not to one’s face, 譽 praise not to one’s face, 稱 praise to one’s face and 譏 disparagement to one’s face, and counts four as adverse (四違) and four as favourable (四順). Any one-to-one mapping of 毀 譽 稱 譏 onto yaso, ayaso, nindā, pasaṁsā is therefore a choice, not a settled fact.

The Sarvāstivāda Mahāvibhāṣā (below) uses a different set of words in a different order: 利, 無利, 譽, 非譽, 讚, 毀, 樂, 苦, that is, gain, no gain, praise and disparagement behind one’s back, praise and disparagement to one’s face, pleasure, pain. Its four pairs fall where the Pali pairs fall, each with the pleasant term first, so praise comes before blame as in the Vibhaṅga, and pleasure before pain as in the Pali. Whether its “praise behind one’s back” is the Pali’s “fame” is again a reading, not a settled fact.

The winds. The Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma-Mahāvibhāṣā, an Indian treatise in Xuanzang’s Chinese of 656–659, asks how the Buddha can be unstained by worldly dharmas when he met all eight himself: lavish gifts of robes, an empty alms bowl in a brahmin village, slander by Ciñcā and Sundarī, a thorn in the foot. (The Pali canon has its own empty-bowl episode, SN 4.18, which does not mention the worldly conditions.) The answer, in our paraphrase: as Mount Sumeru on its golden wheel is not toppled by fierce winds from the eight directions, so the Buddha, standing on the golden wheel of the precepts, is not moved by the eight winds of the world (世間八風). They are called worldly, it adds, because worldly beings go along with them.

The image is older in Chinese than Xuanzang. The Liang-dynasty translation of the Ratnamegha-sūtra (大乘寶雲經), by Mandrasena and Saṅghabhara, opens with an assembly of arhats whom “the eight winds of the world cannot move” (世間八風所不能動), and later says the same of the Buddha on his lion seat. Where the image first arose, and whether it stood in the Indian originals, we have not established. The Soka Gakkai dictionary takes its list of the eight winds from the Buddhabhūmi-sūtra-śāstra; the treatise itself names them 世間八法, and a CBETA full-text search finds no 八風 in it.

Chan. The Tang master Dazhu Huihai’s Essential Gateway to Entering the Way through Sudden Awakening defines concentration as having no mind toward objects, so that “the eight winds cannot move it” (八風不能動), and lists them in the Āgama order. The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (1004) has Baizhang Huaihai speak of facing “the five desires and the eight winds” (五欲八風). See Chan, Seon and Thiền.

Nichiren. In Japan, Nichiren’s letter “The Eight Winds” went to his disciple Shijō Kingo in Kamakura, who had been ordered in 1276 to move to distant Echigo; the Soka Gakkai translators date the undated letter to 1277. Worthy persons, Nichiren writes, are “not carried away by the eight winds”, and he tells Kingo not to hold a grudge against his lord. See Nichiren Buddhism.

Nāgārjuna and the Tibetan “eight worldly concerns”

In Tibetan the set is ‘jig rten chos brgyad. 84000’s glossary also lists a Tibetan rlung brgyad, “eight winds”, beside Chinese 八風 and English “eight worldly concerns”.

Nāgārjuna’s Letter to a Friend. In Alexander Berzin’s translation of this Indian Mahāyāna epistle, verse 29 asks the king not to have as objects of the mind “material gain and no gain, happiness and unhappiness, things nice to hear and not nice to hear, or praise and scorn”, and to “Be indifferent”. Berzin calls them “the eight transitory things” and notes they are “sometimes translated as ‘the eight worldly dharmas’”. His 2006 Berlin lecture places the verses under avoiding distraction, in the section on concentration. The antidote comes first, in verse 27: “for the sake of seeing the deepest (truth), make it a habit to pay attention to phenomena correctly”, which Berzin explains as meditation on voidness; he then cites Śāntideva calling the understanding of voidness the actual opponent to these eight. See Nāgārjuna and emptiness.

Langri Thangpa’s Eight Verses. The Kadam mind-training classic ends on them:

The verse goes on to recognising all things as like illusions; the text is discussed on lojong.

Nyala Pema Dündul. His short Advice on Abandoning the Eight Worldly Concerns, translated by Gyurme Avertin and Adam Pearcey, names them “Gain and loss, happiness and unhappiness, / Fame and insignificance, praise and blame”. His remedy: see whatever happens as “like the ten similes of illusion” and rest “beyond the limitations of hope and fear”.

Against the Pali, these Indo-Tibetan pairs differ in more than wording. Happiness and unhappiness come second, not last. Every pair runs pleasant-first, praise and blame included (bstod dang ma bstod). And the third pair, snyan dang mi snyan, stands where the Pali has fame and disgrace; it is “fame and insignificance” for Avertin and Pearcey and “things nice to hear and not nice to hear” in Berzin’s verse, and Berzin glosses it as hearing good or bad news.

The lists side by side

Each row keeps its source’s order; the rows are not a term-for-term mapping.

”Eight worldly winds” in modern English

Ethan Nichtern’s book Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds takes the phrase as its subtitle, and the publisher’s description gives the pairs as praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and insignificance, “and success and failure”, which reads as gain and loss relabelled.

Unshaken like a rock, on Dhammapada 81, and our Buddha quotes use “eight worldly winds” as the umbrella name too. Other numbered lists of the core teachings: the ten perfections, the ten recollections and the five powers.