How do different traditions teach about envy?

Jewish, Buddhist, and Stoic sources converge on treating envy as a genuinely corrosive state, though each offers a different remedy. The Hebrew Bible addresses envy directly in the Ten Commandments: Exodus 20:17 forbids coveting "your neighbor's house... or anything that is your neighbor's," placing envy alongside theft and dishonesty as a matter serious enough for the Decalogue itself, since the desire to possess what belongs to another is treated as the root from which actual wrongdoing grows. Later rabbinic teaching sharpens the warning: Pirkei Avot 4:21 records Rabbi Elazar Ha-kappar's teaching that "envy, lust, and [the desire for] honor drive a person out of the world," grouping envy with two other consuming appetites as forces that destroy a person's inner life rather than simply causing outward harm to others. Buddhist teaching approaches envy through the cultivation of its direct opposite: mudita, usually translated as sympathetic or appreciative joy, is one of the four brahmavihara ("divine abidings") alongside loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity. Where envy contracts around another person's good fortune as a personal loss, mudita is trained as the capacity to feel genuine gladness at someone else's success or happiness, treated as both an antidote to envy and a marker of spiritual progress in its own right, since it requires letting go of the zero-sum framing that makes another's gain feel like one's own diminishment. Stoicism approaches the problem differently again, locating envy's cause in a mistaken judgment about what is actually good. Since Stoic ethics holds that virtue is the only true good and that externals like wealth, status, and reputation are "indifferents," envying someone else's greater share of those externals is, on Stoic terms, envying something that was never worth having in the first place - the cure is not suppressing the feeling but correcting the underlying valuation that produced it. All three traditions treat envy as something to be actively unlearned rather than an unavoidable fact of social life.