Lokadhamma · Pāli: lokadhamma; Skt: lokadharma

Lokadhamma joins loka, “world”, to dhamma, and Bhikkhu Sujato translates the plural as “worldly conditions”. In AN 8.5 the Buddha says that “the eight worldly conditions revolve around the world, and the world revolves around the eight worldly conditions”, and names them: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, pleasure and pain. The list puts blame before praise (nindā ca, pasaṁsā ca), though AN 8.6’s own prose puts praise first when it comes to favouring and opposing. The closing verse calls all eight impermanent, “transient, and perishable”.

AN 8.6 repeats the list and asks what separates two kinds of people. The unlearned ordinary person and the learned noble disciple meet the same eight; neither is spared loss or blame. The difference is in the response. The disciple reflects, “I’ve encountered this gain. It’s impermanent, suffering, and perishable”, and so on through all eight, and so neither favours the pleasant nor opposes the unpleasant (anurodha, virodha). “Having given up favoring and opposing,” the discourse says, they are freed from rebirth, old age and death, and from suffering. That is a claim about liberation, not a promise that a reflection will make a hard day easier.

The set travels beyond the Pali canon. 84000’s glossary of the Tibetan canon gives the Sanskrit lokadharma and the Tibetan ‘jig rten gyi chos (shortened to ‘jig rten chos in the usual name for the set of eight, ‘jig rten chos brgyad), rendered “worldly concerns” or “worldly dharmas”. It also lists a Tibetan rlung brgyad, literally “eight winds” (our gloss), which it renders “eight worldly concerns”, beside the Chinese 八風, and it is that Chinese image of wind that the English name for the set, the eight worldly winds, carries.