What Are the Eight Worldly Concerns and Why Must We Let Them Go?

How being free of stress and anxiety means letting go of the things that you think will make you happy.

In this article, we will cover what the Eight Worldly Concerns are and how they relate to your pursuit of happiness and your freedom from worry, stress, and anxiety.

---

We as sentient beings, every single one of us, have two basic desires in common that drive and motivate absolutely everything that we think, say, and do: the wish to be happy and the wish to be free from suffering.

Within Buddhism, it's taught that the greed that we feel for the things that we want, the aversion that we feel to the things that we don't want, and the confusion that we have about where stable forms of happiness are actually found are the fundamental obstacles to our attainment of true happiness, peace, and well-being. These three factors are so common to the human experience that they are referred to as The Three Poisons within Buddhism and everyone struggles with these three obstacles, and so as a result, humanity as a whole struggles to move forward.

Our pursuit of happiness and our aversion to being unhappy leads us to pursue or avoid what are referred to as The Eight Worldly Concerns; eight concerns which are ever-present in our lives that seem to always be at the foundation of our motivation to do anything. These eight concerns come in four rhyming and easy to remember, yet opposing, pairs:

Read More