Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger

Not the Buddha — a 1993 paraphrase that hardened into a quote Eknath Easwaran 1910–1999 · Indian-born spiritual teacher and translator
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No Pali source exists. The sentence starts life as a paraphrase: in 1993, in To Love Is to Know Me, the teacher and translator Eknath Easwaran wrote that ‘the Buddha says that we are not punished for our anger, we are punished by our anger’ — a summary of Buddhist teaching on karma, explicitly in his own words. Within a year or two the ‘we’ had become ‘you’ and the summary had acquired quotation marks, appearing that way in Judith Sills’ Excess Baggage (1994) and then, as a flat attribution to the Buddha, in James Garbarino’s book of 1995 and a run of titles in 1996. You are watching a paraphrase turn into a quotation in about three years.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger” Not the Buddha. No Pali source exists; the sentence began as Eknath Easwaran's 1993 paraphrase — "we are not punished for our anger, we are punished by our anger" — and was later printed with 'you' and quotation marks.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Gautama Buddha. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the world of Gautama Buddha — founder of Buddhism · northern India. Theme: "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger". 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 "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger". 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 source

Pali canon
Not present — no verse or discourse
Origin
Eknath Easwaran, To Love Is to Know Me (1993) — as paraphrase
First seen as a quotation
Mid-1990s; in print as the Buddha’s words by 1995
Nearest canonical verse
Dhammapada 223 — and it says something else

Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth! Dhammapada 223, trans. F. Max Müller, 1881

The genuine verse on anger, in Müller’s 1881 English. Note that it is an instruction, not a warning: overcome anger with love. The quotation on this page instead makes anger its own penalty — a neat, quotable idea, and one the Dhammapada never advances.

Fake Buddha Quotes — the year-by-year trace

How we traced it

  • The canon says no. There is no Dhammapada verse and no Nikaya discourse containing this sentence. What the Dhammapada does have is a whole run of verses on anger — verse 222 on holding back rising anger like a rolling chariot, verse 223 quoted above, verse 224 on not yielding to it — and none of them frames anger as a punishment read them free ↗.
  • The paper trail is unusually tidy. 1993: Easwaran paraphrases, in the third person, with no quotation marks. 1994: Judith Sills’ Excess Baggage carries a version with the pronoun switched. 1995: James Garbarino’s Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment attributes it to the Buddha outright. 1996: it is in several more books at once, and after that the internet does the rest the year-by-year trace ↗.
  • The pronoun is the fingerprint. Easwaran wrote ‘we’ — the inclusive voice of a teacher describing a shared condition. The version everyone quotes says ‘you’, which turns a description into an admonishment. That single-letter edit is the moment it stopped being commentary and started being scripture.

Two different rights situations sit on this page. The Dhammapada excerpt is free — Müller’s 1881 translation is public domain worldwide. The quotation itself is not ancient and should not be treated as free: it derives from Eknath Easwaran’s 1993 prose, which remains in copyright, and the ‘you’ form was shaped by later authors whose books are also in copyright. A single aphoristic sentence quoted with attribution is a normal, ordinary use; reprinting it as if it were unowned scripture is the thing to avoid. Because we cannot cleanly assign the modern wording to one holder, we make no rights claim about it. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is one of the cleanest case studies we have of how a fake quotation is actually made. Nobody forged anything. A teacher summarised a doctrine, a later writer tidied the pronoun, an editor added quotation marks, and thirty years on it outranks the real verses in search results.

No Pali source not scripture

Not in the Dhammapada, not in the Nikayas. The Dhammapada’s own anger verses (221–224) prescribe overcoming anger with love and non-yielding — they do not describe it as self-inflicted punishment.

Eknath Easwaran, 1993 paraphrase, not quotation

In To Love Is to Know Me he writes that the Buddha says we are not punished for our anger but by it. That is a teacher glossing karma in his own words — a perfectly honest thing to do, and not a translation of anything the trace ↗.

‘we’ becomes ‘you’ one letter

Judith Sills’ Excess Baggage (1994) carries the switched-pronoun form. Inclusive commentary becomes direct address, and direct address sounds like someone speaking — which invites quotation marks, which invites a speaker.

1995–1996 print run attributed outright

By 1995 it is in print credited to the Buddha; in 1996 it appears in several books at once. After that no individual author is responsible for it and the correction never catches up.

Real doctrine, wrong form not un-Buddhist

Karma as consequence rather than external penalty is genuine Buddhist teaching, and Easwaran was summarising it fairly. The error is not the idea — it is the quotation marks.

Not the Buddha. Eknath Easwaran’s 1993 paraphrase, republished with a changed pronoun and quotation marks until it became a quotation the trace ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

It reframes anger as a bad deal rather than a sin, which is far more persuasive to a modern reader. Nobody is threatening you; the arithmetic is simply against you, and you can check it yourself the next time you spend an afternoon furious at someone who has no idea.

The for/by construction is also just a very good piece of writing — two identical clauses hinged on a single preposition. That is a rhetorician’s move, not a translator’s, and it is one of the clues that no Pali original is hiding behind it.

Nobody forged it. Somebody changed 'we' to 'you' and added quotation marks.

How a paraphrase becomes a quotation

1993: Easwaran writes 'the Buddha says that we are not punished for our anger, we are punished by our anger' — his summary, in his voice.

1994: the line appears in Judith Sills' Excess Baggage with 'we' changed to 'you'.

1995: James Garbarino's book attributes it to the Buddha directly.

1996: several more titles carry it, and the original paraphrase is no longer visible behind them.

The whole mechanism takes three years and requires nobody to lie.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Resilience

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

You will not be punished for your anger — Fake Buddha Quotesfakebuddhaquotes.com

The dated trail from Easwaran’s 1993 paraphrase to the 1990s books that printed it as a quotation.
Dhammapada, trans. F. Max Müller (1881)gutenberg.org

Verses 221–224 are the canonical teaching on anger. Search it and you will not find this sentence.
Eknath Easwaranen.wikipedia.org

Background on the teacher and translator whose paraphrase became the quotation.
Fake Buddha Quotes, debunkedtricycle.org

Bodhipaksa in Tricycle on why these lines spread, and what is lost when they do.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on the Buddha

Gautama Buddha

c. 5th century BCE · founder of Buddhism · northern India

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, taught in northern India in roughly the fifth century BCE, and anger is one of the subjects his recorded teaching returns to most often — the Dhammapada devotes a chapter to it. That genuine emphasis is exactly what makes the misattribution stick: a reader who knows the Buddha talked about anger has no reason to doubt a sentence that talks about anger well. The irony is that the good modern sentence displaces the actual verses, which are stranger and more demanding than ‘anger hurts you’.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Not canonical. Originates as a paraphrase in Eknath Easwaran, To Love Is to Know Me (1993); circulated as a direct quotation from the mid-1990s. Compare Dhammapada 223, trans. F. Max Müller (1881).

MLA (9th ed.)

Easwaran, Eknath. To Love Is to Know Me. 1993. Paraphrase of Buddhist teaching, later quoted as the Buddha’s words.

APA (7th ed.)

Easwaran, E. (1993). To Love Is to Know Me. Paraphrase later circulated as a direct quotation.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You will not be punished for your anger’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-will-not-be-punished-for-your-anger-you-will-be

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