Matsarya and the Remedy of Mudita

Where the Gita answers kama and krodha with discernment and self mastery, the more common remedy Hindu ethical and devotional literature proposes for matsarya specifically is mudita, sympathetic joy, deliberately cultivating delight in another's good fortune as the direct rehearsal of the opposite mental state, a remedy notably shared in close to identical form with Buddhist practice, where mudita appears among the four immeasurables cultivated for the same purpose against the same failing. This convergence is worth noting precisely because the two traditions otherwise diagnose the surrounding vice differently, Hindu ethics through the arishadvarga and Buddhist ethics through the kleshas, yet arrive independently at rehearsed joy in another's success as matsarya's and irshya's practical antidote, suggesting the remedy tracks something about the structure of envy itself rather than the doctrinal system that names it.

Devotional Hindu traditions add a further resource less available to purely philosophical ethics: bhakti literature frequently frames surrender to a personal deity as dissolving the comparative frame matsarya depends on altogether, since a devotee whose sense of worth rests on relationship to the divine rather than on standing relative to other people has, in principle, less footing left for the vice to take hold of, a theological rather than psychological answer to the same enemy the arishadvarga names.