Matsarya, the Sixth Enemy

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.