Muditā

Muditā is the quality of sympathetic joy.

This one has always interested me greatly–mostly because it was something that I often seemed to lack. I used to suffer enormously from jealousy, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. It would just come, and the more I tried to disguise it, the worse it would get. I could really spoil things for people, just through this horrible thing that used to happen when I had a sense that somebody was in some way more fortunate or better than I was.

Considering the three characteristics of existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and lacking in any permanent self-hood) was what brought a glimmer of hope—to realize that jealousy is impermanent. Before, it would feel very, very permanent–as though I would have to do something extremely major to get rid of it, to make it go away. It also felt like a very personal flaw.

So this teaching enabled me to recognize that this was just a passing condition and that I didn’t have to identify with it. It came, and it went. Certainly, it was extremely unpleasant–but when I could let go of the struggle for things to be otherwise, it actually didn’t stay very long; it would come and it would go, and that would be it.

People used to tell me about their muditā practice. They’d say: ‘Well, if I see somebody who has something better than me, I just feel really glad they have it’ – but I hadn’t quite got to that point, I must say – I didn’t have such generosity of heart. I realized that there was still something missing. Eventually, I realized that what was lacking was muditā for myself. I realized that it was no good trying to have muditā for somebody else if what they had was something that I really wanted – and thought I hadn’t got!

So I saw that, rather than lamenting my own lack (which is basically what jealousy is, and which I would find so painful to acknowledge), I had to begin to look at what I had, to count my own blessings. This may sound a little strange in a context where many of us have been encouraged to rejoice in the goodness and beauty of others, but where the last thing we are supposed to do is to count our own blessings, or to think of how good we are … but I saw that that was actually what I needed to do.

This reflection by Ajahn Candasiri is from the book, Friends on the Path, (pdf) pp. 67-68.