The first half is a fair rendering of a real discourse; the second half is not scripture at all. In the Bhaddekaratta Sutta (MN 131), in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation ↗ the Buddha’s verse runs “You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.” It says to see the present clearly. It does not say there is only one moment for you to live. That flourish is Thích Nhất Hạnh’s, from talks in which he introduced the thought as something “the Buddha said that…” — a reporting clause the printed versions dropped.
“The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live” Not the Buddha. The wording is Thích Nhất Hạnh's, given in Dharma talks as reported speech and later printed inside quotation marks. The canonical model is the Bhaddekaratta Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 131), whose verse reads, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation: "What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there." Traced by Quotle.info.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Gautama Buddha. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Thích Nhất Hạnh — Vietnamese Zen monk, teacher and peace activist. Theme: "The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The discourse, and what was added to it
Canonical model
Bhaddekaratta Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 131)
Translation quoted
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “An Auspicious Day,” Access to Insight
The popular wording
Thích Nhất Hạnh, in Dharma talks and books published under his name
Printed as a quotation in
Breathe, You Are Alive — which Bodhipaksa dates to 2008
You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there. Not taken in, unshaken, that’s how you develop the heart.
MN 131 · trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The sutta’s verse, run together as prose. The instruction is to see present experience clearly and stay unshaken by it — a different claim from “there’s only one moment for you to live,” which reads the verse as a statement about how much life you have rather than about where to put your attention.
The Buddha’s verse in MN 131, “An Auspicious Day” ↗ reads in full: “You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.” The first two clauses of the popular quote track it closely; the third has no counterpart.
Bodhipaksa’s Fake Buddha Quotes entry on this line (archived 17 August 2025) ↗ calls it fake and gives the reason in one sentence: “There’s only one moment for you to live” is “far too metaphorical and poetic for the language of the Pali canon.” He identifies the Bhaddekaratta Sutta as the scriptural model.
The English wording is modern and under copyright: it comes from Dharma talks given in the 1990s and from books published under Thích Nhất Hạnh’s name. Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation of MN 131, quoted above, is offered by Access to Insight under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence — free to share with attribution, but not public domain either.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Two-thirds scripture, one-third flourish
The quote is not made up out of nothing. It is a real teaching with a memorable line welded on, and the weld is where the attribution fails.
✕
The attributionGautama Buddha Misattributed
The sentence appears in no Pali discourse. Bodhipaksa’s objection is stylistic as well as textual ↗: “There’s only one moment for you to live” is, he writes, “far too metaphorical and poetic for the language of the Pali canon,” which is formulaic and repetitive by design.
~
The wordingThích Nhất Hạnh, in Dharma talks Paraphrase, not quotation
He introduced the thought as reported speech — “The Buddha said that the past is already gone…” — which is a summary, not a citation. The reporting clause disappears in the printed version ↗, and with it the signal that these are the paraphraser’s words.
~
The third clauseNo canonical counterpart Modern phrasing, not a canonical line
MN 131 ↗ tells you not to chase the past or place expectations on the future, and to see present experience clearly without being taken in by it. Reading that as “there’s only one moment for you to live” is an interpretation — a defensible one, but an interpretation, and the sutta never makes the claim itself.
✓What the Buddha is recorded as saying, in the Bhaddekaratta Sutta ↗, is quieter and more practical: “You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future… Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there. Not taken in, unshaken, that’s how you develop the heart.”
Context
Why the flourish is the giveaway
The Pali discourses were composed to be memorised and chanted by people who had no writing. That gives them a very particular texture: stock phrases, exhaustive lists, whole paragraphs repeated verbatim with one noun swapped. It is superb mnemonic engineering and it is nobody’s idea of quotable prose. A line that lands in eleven crisp words is, on style alone, evidence of a modern hand.
The Bhaddekaratta Sutta is also not really about seizing the day. Thanissaro Bhikkhu notes in his introduction that bhaddekaratta was probably a pre-Buddhist term the Buddha adopted and re-interpreted — the point being that your own attitude to time, rather than stars or omens, is what makes a day auspicious. The discourse then spends most of its length on a technical analysis of how one “chases after the past” through the five aggregates. It is a meditation instruction, not a memento mori.
Eleven crisp words are not how the Pali canon talks.
What the sutta actually walks through
After the verse, the Buddha defines each of its terms in turn: chasing after the past means delighting in “in the past I had such a form… such a feeling… such a perception… such a thought-fabrication… such a consciousness”; placing expectations on the future is the same list in the future tense. The full analysis is in the discourse ↗.
Being “taken in with regard to present qualities” is then defined as seeing form as self, or self as possessing form, and so on through all five aggregates. None of this is about the shortness of life. It is about not identifying with experience as it arises — which is why the closing line of the verse is “not taken in, unshaken,” not “you have only this moment.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1926–2022 · Vietnamese Zen monk, teacher and peace activist
Thích Nhất Hạnh spent thirty-nine years exiled from Vietnam for refusing to take a side in its war, and built at Plum Village in France a community whose main export was talk — hundreds of Dharma talks a year, given in English to mixed audiences and then transcribed into books. He was a genuinely great populariser of early Buddhist material, which is why so many of the lines pinned on the Buddha online turn out to be his: the summaries were good enough to sound canonical.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Source
Thích Nhất Hạnh, paraphrasing the Buddha in Dharma talks and in books published under his name; reported by Bodhipaksa as printed inside quotation marks in Breathe, You Are Alive, which he dates to 2008. Canonical model: Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 131, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live’?” Last verified 21 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-past-is-already-gone-the-future-is-not-yet-here-theres/