# The Puppet Another Hand Carved

- Link: https://legawa.com/filsafat/the-puppet-another-hand-carved/
- Published: 2026-11-09T17:00:00+07:00
- Author: Cahya

## 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](https://legawa.com/2025/09/04/the-weight-of-grudges-anchors-holding-us-back/):
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](https://legawa.com/2026/03/30/the-cartography-of-vanity-a-meditation-on-men-and-their-names/)
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.

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**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._