I. The Carver of Wukirsari
In Wukirsari, where the lanes of Bantul smell of scorched buffalo hide and lamp oil, Mbah Tentrem had carved wayang for fifty years. Her tatah chisels were worn to slivers. Her apprentice, Wisnu, had been with her for six, and for six years he had believed his hands were the equal of anyone’s.
Then a dalang from Surakarta ordered an Arjuna from the workshop across the lane, the one owned by Pak Joko, and paid in advance. The whole village spoke of it. Wisnu stopped eating at midday. He sharpened his chisel too hard and cracked a half-finished Semar down the middle.
Mbah Tentrem looked at the broken hide and said nothing about it. She said, “Carry this bundle of scraps to Pak Joko. He is short of small pieces for the filigree.”
Wisnu went, burning. In the yard behind Joko’s shed he saw what no customer ever sees: a stack of spoiled hides as high as his chest. Warped, over-cut, torn at the lace of the perforations. Forty, perhaps fifty. Joko, bent over a bench with his back to him, did not look up.
When Wisnu returned, his teacher asked, “What did you bring back?”
“The scraps were delivered,” he said. “And I saw his failures.”
“How many puppets did the dalang buy?”
“One.”
“And how many hides did Joko ruin to make that one?”
Wisnu was quiet. Then Mbah Tentrem said, “You saw the one that was sold. You envied a single hour of his life and ignored the years. Envy is a hunger that has learned the shape of another person’s plate. It cannot taste what the plate cost.”
The question she left him is the one this essay carries: when another person receives what we wanted, how do we keep our own work from rotting in the shadow of theirs?
II. Two Strifes
Hesiod opens the Works and Days with a correction to his own earlier poem. There is not one Strife in the world, he says, but two. One Strife grows war and quarrel, and no one honours her. The other, older, set by Zeus in the roots of the earth, wakes even the idle man to work, because he sees his neighbour hurrying to plant and build:
καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει καὶ τέκτονι τέκτων,
καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ φθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ.
kai kerameus kerameï koteei kai tektoni tektōn, kai ptōchos ptōchō phthoneei kai aoidos aoidō.
“Potter is angry at potter, craftsman at craftsman; beggar envies beggar, and singer singer.” (Works and Days 25–26)
Notice who is envied: the nearest. Not the king, but the one who does the same work on the same lane. Mbah Tentrem’s apprentice did not envy the Sultan’s court painter. He envied Joko.
Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, separates what Hesiod folds together. Phthonos, envy, is the pain felt at the good fortune of those like us, and it wants them to lose it. Zēlos, emulation, is a pain too, but it is the pain of seeing that something good is within reach and that we have not yet reached it. Emulation sends us back to the bench. Envy sends us to the neighbour’s door. The two begin in the same ache, and the whole moral life of the carver depends on where the ache is allowed to travel.
III. The Fruit and the Orchard
The Javanese tradition has a sentence for what Wisnu forgot. In the Serat Wedhatama, a text attributed to Mangkunegara IV, the Pocung stanza says:
Ngelmu iku kalakone kanthi laku,
lekasé lawan kas,
tegesé kas nyantosani,
setya budya pangekesé dur angkara.
“Knowledge comes to fruition through practice; it begins with resolve, and resolve means making oneself strong: a steadfast discipline that crushes the pull of arrogance and ill-will.”
Laku is not a talent. It is the daily, unwitnessed repetition, and the stanza says that even the fruit of knowledge is made of it. What the envious eye sees is the fruit. The orchard, the frost, the failed seasons stay behind the fence.
The Bhagavad Gita approaches the same fence from the other side. Arjuna, trembling on the field, is told:
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात् ।
śreyān svadharmo viguṇaḥ paradharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt.
“Better one’s own duty done imperfectly than another’s duty done well.” (3.35)
The verse is usually quoted as comfort. It is closer to a discipline. Another person’s polished work carries a hidden cost: a different body, a different field, a different set of debts. To take up the life that produced it, and abandon yours, is to enter a stranger’s house and find it already furnished with someone else’s burdens. The Gita does not say that your work is better. It says that it is yours, and that only yours can be completed by you.
IV. The Poison That Poisons the Drinker
The Qur’an closes with two short chapters of refuge, and the last of the list of evils from which one seeks shelter is this:
وَمِن شَرِّ حَاسِدٍ إِذَا حَسَدَ
wa min sharri ḥāsidin idhā ḥasad.
“…and from the evil of the envier when he envies.” (113:5)
The phrase “when he envies” carries weight. The text does not condemn the person for existing in a state of lack. It names the moment when the feeling becomes a deed: a rumour passed on, a gift withheld, a quiet pleasure at another’s stumble.
The Muslim moral tradition, including al-Ghazali in the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, draws a careful line here. Ḥasad is the wish that another’s blessing be taken away. Ghibṭa is the wish to have the same good without wishing the other to lose it, and a well-known report in al-Bukhari grants a rare permission for it, in two cases: for the person given wealth who spends it rightly, and the person given wisdom who teaches it. This is a discipline of taste more than of suppression. You are permitted to want what the other has. You are not permitted to want the other to be without it.
Al-Ghazali adds a diagnostic that any clinician would recognise: the envier harms himself first. The wound is carried inside the one who feels it, and the envied person, often unaware, walks on untouched. The same weight sits in the older resentments the site has traced elsewhere, in The Weight of Grudges: an anchor that the hand keeps pulling up and dropping again.
V. The Worthy One Is a Mirror
Confucius, in the Analects, turns the envied person into a teacher:
見賢思齊焉,見不賢而內自省也。
jiàn xián sī qí yān, jiàn bù xián ér nèi zì xǐng yě.
“When you see someone worthy, think of becoming his equal; when you see someone unworthy, turn inward and examine yourself.” (4.17)
Here is Aristotle’s zēlos in another language. The worthy neighbour is not a thief of the portion; he is evidence that the portion can be reached. But the verse has a second half that envy never reads. Even the unworthy person is a mirror. The man who looks at another’s success and says “he doesn’t deserve it” has stopped examining anything.
Mbah Tentrem used this method without ever quoting it. She did not tell Wisnu that his work was better than Joko’s. She sent him to look at Joko’s work until he could name its parts: the evenness of the lace, the patience of the shoulder line, the forty hides behind the shed. Envy refuses to study. Emulation begins by studying.
The lesson travels well beyond a puppet workshop. Any house of skilled people has its Joko: the colleague whose name is spoken first at the ward meeting, the neighbour whose clinic is full, the younger one praised for what took the elder twenty years to learn. In such rooms the sharpest temptation is the quiet belittling remark, which looks like judgment and is only hunger. A better habit is to ask the admired person how the thing was made, and to listen to the answer all the way to its failures. The vanity that keeps a name guarded, which the essay The Cartography of Vanity examines, tends to loosen when the honest history of a craft is shared.
VI. Gladness as a Discipline
The Buddhist tradition treats the opposite of envy as something that can be trained. Among the four brahmavihāra, the boundless states, the third is muditā: sympathetic joy, gladness in the good fortune of others. Teachers of the tradition commonly name envy as the quality that quietly shadows it, and say that muditā must be practiced precisely where it is hardest, toward those who stand close to us. The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta (Sutta Nipāta 1.8) frames the aspiration widely:
sukhino vā khemino hontu, sabbasattā bhavantu sukhitattā.
“May they be happy and secure; may all beings be happy-minded.”
The wish is cast first on every creature. But the practice, as taught, has to pass through the specific person: the colleague, the neighbour, the one across the lane. A wish that stays general is easy. Gladness for Pak Joko is a labour.
The Bhagavad Gita names the same temper when it describes the person dear to the divine in chapter twelve:
अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्रः करुण एव च
adveṣṭā sarvabhūtānāṃ maitraḥ karuṇa eva ca.
“Without hatred toward any being, friendly and compassionate.” (12.13)
The two traditions are not saying the same thing. The Buddhist path trains a joy that arises, in time, without clinging to its own share; the Gita sets it inside a life of offered action, where the fruit of work is not mine to measure against anyone’s. What they share is a refusal to let the heart become a ledger.
VII. The Kestrel
The twentieth-century philosopher Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, describes a small scene of her own. She is anxious and resentful, preoccupied with a slight to her pride, when she notices a hovering kestrel outside the window. In that instant the brooding self disappears. There is only the bird. When she returns to the grievance, she says, it seems less important.
Murdoch’s lesson is that moral life is largely a matter of attention. Envy is attention bent in a loop: we gaze at another person’s good and then at our own lack, back and forth, until nothing else exists. The cure is not suppression but a change of object. Look at the hide. Look at the grain of the chisel line. Look at Joko’s hands. Anything real, regarded with care, loosens the grip of the loop.
VIII. What Remains to Be Done
Javanese ethics keeps a phrase for the settled posture that makes this possible: nrima ing pandum, to receive what is allotted. It is often misread as passivity, a shrug before fate. Read next to the Wedhatama, it is the opposite. The pandum, the portion, is received and then worked. Nrima ends the quarrel with the portion so that laku can begin. A person still arguing with what was dealt has no hands free to carve.
Bali offers a companion in the formula tat twam asi, “you are that,” from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, which Balinese Hindu ethics carries into daily neighbourliness. The other person’s flourishing is not a rival’s trophy standing in the same fraction of space. It is the same life, appearing in a different house. Where that is felt, the neighbour’s Arjuna is a kind of harvest the village has gathered together.
None of this can be left as sentiment. The tradition asks for acts, and this essay can end only with some.
First, name the person. Envy hides in generalities; give it a face and a lane. Second, find the forty hides: ask what the visible success cost, and refuse to count only the sold puppet. Third, say the praise aloud, in the person’s hearing, within the week, in specific terms: this line, this proportion, this patience. Praise that has to be specific has to be studied. Fourth, return to your own bench the same evening and carve one line, however poor, in your own hand. The portion is yours only when it is worked.
Mbah Tentrem mended the cracked Semar with a pin of bamboo and a seam of glue made from the hide’s own trimmings. “You may keep it as it is,” she told Wisnu. “A puppet that was nearly destroyed by envy will be useful on the day you are tempted again.” That evening he crossed the lane, without a bundle this time, and told Pak Joko what he had noticed in the Arjuna’s shoulder line. Joko, startled, put down his chisel. It was the first time in months anyone had spoken of the work and not the price.
Tags: envy, emulation, craft, nrima ing pandum, tat twam asi, comparative philosophy, serat wedhatama
A puppet-carver’s apprentice envies his neighbour’s commission until his teacher sends him to see the forty ruined hides behind the single sold puppet. Hesiod, Aristotle, the Gita, al-Ghazali, Confucius, the Buddha and Iris Murdoch meet the Wedhatama’s laku, closing with four practical acts, in nrima ing pandum and tat twam asi.
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