This awesome text on compassion written nearly 1300 years ago, called ‘8 Verses of Mind Training’ by the humble saint-scholar Langri Thangpa,’ verse 8 reads:
“In all this may my mind be unstained
By the eight ordinary concerns,
And know all things to be like illusion;
Free of clinging may I release all beings from bondage.”
The eight worldly concerns are four sets of opposites: praise and blame; reputation and disgrace; gain and loss; and pleasure and pain. We can work to reduce these using many approaches like equalizing self and other, humility, impermanence, and what goes up must come down. But to fully eliminate attachment to these common ego-related concerns, we must understand and practice wisdom of nonattachment. Slowly over time as we understand shunyata (wisdom of emptiness) we will not to be even tinged by the 8 worldly concerns because deeply they do not exist. Similarly, myself, the one so affected, does not exist as we think it does. Furthermore there is no objective existence of our body and our mind, even though these continue to appear to our mind. We come to experience these appearances of myself, my body, and all phenomena, as like illusions. The Buddha gave the analogy of an image in a dream upon awakening. In our dream we feel the image, say of our friend, to be real and we feel happy. As we wake up we realize it was just a dream, like an illusion. All of reality is like this.