Buddhism and Jealousy: Working With Envy

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Jealousy and envy, in Buddhism, are understood as a self-inflicted form of suffering: the mind resenting another person’s success, qualities, or good fortune. The Pali word is issa, classed among the defilements and rooted in aversion. But Buddhism does more than diagnose it — it offers a precise antidote, mudita, the joy that is gladdened by exactly what envy resents.

Most of us feel the sting and reach instinctively for self-criticism: I shouldn’t feel this; what’s wrong with me? The Buddhist approach is gentler and more useful. Envy is not a sin to be ashamed of but a knot to be understood and, with practice, untied — and the tradition is unusually specific about how.

What Envy Is: Issa and Its Companion, Macchariya

In the Pali tradition, envy has a precise name: issa — displeasure or resentment at the good fortune, success, or fine qualities of others. It travels almost everywhere with a companion defilement, macchariya, usually translated as stinginess or possessiveness: the clutching reluctance to share what we have, whether wealth, status, or even the people we love. Envy says why should they have it?; stinginess says no one shall have mine. They are two faces of the same scarcity.

The Abhidhamma — the tradition’s detailed map of mind-states — places both among the akusala (unwholesome) mental factors, and specifically among those that arise only with aversion-rooted consciousness (dosa-mūla-citta), alongside kukkucca, remorse or anxious regret. This is worth pausing on. We often imagine envy as a kind of wanting, a cousin of greed. But the tradition files it under aversion — because at its core envy is a turning-against: a recoil from another’s happiness, a small ill-will dressed up as comparison. That is why it feels so corrosive. You are not simply wishing for something; you are, quietly, wishing against someone.

This is also why Buddhism does not treat envy as a sin. The word is akusala — unskilful, unwholesome — a medical category rather than a moral verdict. Envy is a wound that hurts the one who carries it. The question is never how bad a person am I? but how do I heal this?

Where Envy Comes From: The Three Poisons and a Comparing Self

Envy doesn’t appear from nowhere. It grows from the same root system as nearly all suffering in Buddhist analysis — the three poisons: greed, aversion, and delusion. The greed supplies the wanting (I want what they have); the aversion supplies the resentment (and I resent that they have it); and underneath both sits the deepest root, delusion — specifically the delusion of a separate, bounded self that must measure itself against all the other selves.

Envy is, in a sense, comparison that has caught fire. It depends entirely on a “me” set apart from a “them,” ranked on some invisible ladder, so that another’s rise feels like my fall. Remove that fixed, comparing self — even loosen it a little — and envy loses the ground it stands on. There is no longer a fixed “me” being diminished by your success.

The earliest texts trace this with striking precision. In the Sakkapañha Sutta (DN 21), the deva-king Sakka asks the Buddha why beings who long to live “free from hostility, free from ill will” nonetheless live in conflict. The Buddha’s answer: they are “fettered by envy and stinginess” (issa and macchariya). Sakka presses further — but what is the cause of envy and stinginess? The Buddha traces the chain back: envy and stinginess arise from things being dear-and-not-dear (our likes and dislikes); these arise from desire; desire from thinking; and thinking from the mind’s habit of objectification (papañca) — the proliferating conceptual activity that carves the world into me and mine, them and theirs. Envy, in other words, is the surface symptom of a very deep habit of dividing.

The Distinctive Antidote: Mudita, Sympathetic Joy

Here is where Buddhism offers something genuinely distinctive. The cure for envy is not merely to suppress it, or to talk yourself out of it, but to cultivate its exact opposite — mudita, sympathetic or altruistic joy: gladness at the happiness and good fortune of others.

Mudita is the third of the four brahmaviharas, the “sublime states” or “divine abodes,” alongside loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and equanimity (upekkha). Britannica defines it plainly as the joy found in “the sight of others who have attained happiness.” And it maps onto envy with almost mathematical neatness: where envy suffers at another’s good fortune, mudita is uplifted by it. The very event — your friend’s promotion, a rival’s windfall, a stranger’s joy — that the envious mind experiences as a wound, the mind trained in mudita experiences as a gift. Same event; opposite response.

In the classical scheme of “near” and “far” enemies, envy and aversion are named the far enemies of mudita — its obvious opposites. But the tradition is honest about a subtler trap, the near enemy: a giddy, worldly over-involvement, getting swept up in someone’s success out of our own sense of lack, or vicariously feasting on their pleasures. True mudita isn’t that excitable grasping; it is a clear, steady gladness that asks nothing back.

Commentators are candid that mudita is often the hardest of the four brahmaviharas to cultivate — precisely because the reflex of comparison is so deep, and because rejoicing in a rival’s good fortune can feel, at first, almost unnatural. That difficulty is not a reason to skip it. It is the signal that you are working exactly where the knot is tightest.

Mudita Is Not Forced Positivity

A caution, in keeping with how the tradition actually teaches this. Mudita is not a mask you paint over envy, and it is not toxic positivity. You do not cultivate sympathetic joy by denying the envy you feel — that is suppression, which only drives the feeling underground. As with all difficult emotions in Buddhist practice, the first move is honest acknowledgement: yes, this is envy; this is what it feels like; I’d rather not keep feeding it.

Only from that clear-eyed honesty does the deliberate cultivation begin. Nor is mudita a demand that you celebrate genuine injustice or pretend that harm is fine. It is gladness at another’s well-being and happiness — not approval of every outcome in the world. Honest, clear, and quietly glad: that is the texture to aim for.

A Practice: Training the Heart Toward Gladness

The brahmaviharas are not just attitudes to admire; they are skills you can deliberately train, much as you would loving-kindness. A simple mudita practice goes like this:

• Begin with the easy case. Buddhaghosa, in the Visuddhimagga, advises starting not with a rival but with someone whose happiness is easy to share — a cheerful good friend who is doing well. Bring them to mind and silently offer: May your happiness continue. May your good fortune grow. Feel, if you can, the small lift of being genuinely glad for them.
• Widen the circle. From that friend, extend the same wish to neutral people, and then — this is the real training — toward someone you envy. May your success continue. May your happiness grow. It may feel hollow or even grudging at first. Do it anyway; the heart learns by repetition, and the resistance you meet is the practice working.
• Catch envy in daily life. When the familiar sting arrives — scrolling past someone’s good news, hearing of a colleague’s win — name it: envy. Then deliberately turn it: good for them; may it continue. You are not lying about your feeling; you are choosing which response to strengthen.

Two supporting practices stand behind mudita. Metta, loving-kindness, softens the underlying ill-will so that gladness has somewhere to grow. And contentment (santutthi) — appreciating the sufficiency of your own life — starves comparison at the source: it is hard to envy from a heart that already feels it has enough. For the deepest cut, reflection on non-self dissolves the very “me-versus-them” that envy is built on; this is the long work of letting go of the comparing self entirely.

Why This Matters in an Age of Comparison

It is hard to imagine a teaching more pointed for the present moment. We live inside engineered comparison — feeds tuned to show us, endlessly, the curated good fortune of others, manufacturing low-grade envy as a business model. Buddhism names that ache precisely (issa), traces it to its root (a separate, comparing self), and hands us the one response that turns the whole machine inside out: instead of being diminished by others’ happiness, be enlarged by it.

That is not a trick for feeling better. It is a different way of standing in the world — one where another’s good fortune is no longer subtracted from yours but added to a happiness you share. Like the rest of the path, it is built in small, repeatable moments rather than a single resolution; for the wider practice it belongs to, see Buddhism in everyday life, and for the terms used here, the glossary. Each time you meet the sting of envy and answer it with even a flicker of good for them, you loosen the knot a little more — and the joy you wish to others quietly becomes your own.