Matsarya (Envy)

Matsarya closes the list of six enemies, and commentators generally pair it with mada as the two arishadvarga most concerned with comparison to others rather than with an object desired or resisted for its own sake: where mada is satisfaction taken in an advantage one already holds, matsarya is displeasure at an advantage another holds, a distinction that keeps the two enemies structurally opposite while treating both as failures of the same underlying comparing mind.

The Mahabharata provides one of Hindu literature's most extended studies of the vice in the relationship between the Kauravas and Pandavas, where Duryodhana's inability to bear his cousins' success, virtue and popular regard is presented across the epic as a corrosive force operating independently of any concrete injury the Pandavas actually do him, matsarya requiring no real grievance to sustain itself, only the bare fact of another's flourishing. Puranic literature frequently extends the vice beyond human relationships to describe rivalries among the devas themselves, the gods experiencing matsarya toward one another's honours and worshippers, a theological choice that keeps the enemy from being framed as a purely human failing correctable by superior status, since even divine figures in these narratives are shown susceptible to it.

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.