TO BE JEALOUS IS FOOLISH
Master Jun Hong Lu: Let me use a magnifying glass to enlarge this feeling of jealousy in you. Once magnified, do you know what has become of you? You will realise how foolish you are. You are jealous of your colleague who makes you wonder, “Why is it that he deserves this, not me?”, “Why is it that her husband is rich, while mine is poor?” This is just a minor observation.
Now, let me continue to magnify the situation. Imagine you are jealous of someone like Li Ka Shing. By now, do you realise how foolish you are? You wonder, “Why is it that he is so wealthy, while I am penniless?” All that I do is just to magnify the matter in hand, and it will immediately hit you as to how foolish you are. Jealousy is a point in one’s ignorance.
Why is it referred to as ‘a point’? This is because things expand out from one point. At the initial stage, one may feel a mild sense of jealousy but later on it develops into a pervasive sense of jealousy.
Have you heard of a traditional Chinese stand-up comedy called ‘Pinkeye’? It is a play whose theme is on jealousy with its character perceiving everything as a cause for jealousy and desires to outdo everyone in everything. It gets so bad that the person will also be jealous of those whose blood pressure is higher than his. So, what could be the reason behind this phenomenon? This is because one’s visibility can be made obscure by ignorance that is capable of blinding a person to the extent that he fails to distinguish between good and evil, and this includes the inability to know what he should and shouldn’t have.
Source: Master Jun Hong Lu’s Buddhism In Plain Terms, Volume 9 Chapter 2
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