Buddha Quotes on Anger: 20 Real Lines, Every One Sourced

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 17 September 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

The most-shared Buddha quote about anger — holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die — is not his. It appears nowhere in any Buddhist canon. What he did say fills a whole chapter of the Dhammapada and several discourses besides. Here are eighteen of those lines, each with an address you can check — and two more from the later traditions, named as theirs and not as his.

Every quotation below is Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation unless the caption says otherwise, linked to the exact page it comes from. His SuttaCentral translations are released CC0, which is what makes it possible to set the verses out in full rather than paraphrase them. Where a second translator’s wording changes the sense, we show both.

The poison verse the Buddha actually spoke

The “drinking poison” line is worth naming precisely because there is a real verse underneath the impulse behind it — and it is sharper. Sakka, lord of the gods, asks the Buddha what one thing is worth killing. The answer is a small masterpiece of diagnosis:

The Pali is kodhassa visamūlassa, madhuraggassa — poison at the root, sweetness at the tip. That is the opposite shape from the internet quote, and a far better description of the experience. Anger does not taste of poison. It tastes good, especially at the moment you give in to it; the harm is underground, in the root, and arrives later. Notice too what the Buddha offers as the evidence: not a moral argument but a night’s sleep. Vāsava is another name for Sakka, the deity who also appears in SN 11.4 below.

The law: the grudge, the hatred, and how enmity ends

The Dhammapada’s opening chapter states the principle across four verses, and the sequence matters — the first two are a matched pair, the third generalises from them, and the fourth says who has to act on it.

The same four injuries, twice. Nothing in the situation changes between the verses — the abuse, the blow, the beating and the theft are all still real and still wrong. The only variable is the Pali verb upanayhati, “to bear a grudge”, literally to tie up or bind something close. What the verse isolates is not the injury but the rehearsal of it. This is the mechanism Buddhism and forgiveness works with.

This is the most famous of all Buddha quotes on anger, and the one most often met in Acharya Buddharakkhita’s wording — hatred is never appeased by hatred. Sujato translates averena as “by love”; Buddharakkhita and Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu keep the literal negative — “non-hatred alone is hatred appeased” and “stilled through non-hostility”. The Pali itself only says that hatred’s opposite is what stills it; how far to name that opposite is the translator’s decision. We set the three side by side on the page for “Hatred is never appeased by hatred”.

The verse the collections rarely include, and the one with the most practical bite. The commentarial setting is the quarrel at Kosambī, where the monastic community split so badly the Buddha left it. It is addressed to the party that has understood, and it asks them to move first and unilaterally — not to wait for the other side to be reasonable. Verse 5 describes a law; verse 6 says who has to act on it, and the answer is: whoever sees it.

The Chapter on Anger: Dhammapada 221–234

The seventeenth chapter of the Dhammapada is the Kodhavagga — the Chapter on Anger, fourteen verses gathered under that heading by the anthology’s compilers. Not all fourteen are about anger; four of them concern praise and blame, which tells you what the compilers thought the usual trigger was. The four passages below — six of the fourteen verses — are the chapter’s core.

The chapter opens by pairing anger with conceit (māna), which is not the obvious pairing — we file anger with hatred, not with pride. But the two arrive together: the affront that ignites a temper is almost always an affront to a position one is holding. The verse then widens past both, to the fetters and to clinging itself, which is the Dhammapada’s way of saying that anger is a symptom, not the disease.

The best single image in the chapter, and the one most often mangled into a slogan about “controlling” anger. Read it exactly: the chariot is already lurching. The verse does not promise a mind in which anger never arises; it describes the person who can check one that has already started. Everyone else, the Buddha says, merely holds the reins — the equipment of a charioteer without the skill. It is a quiet joke at the expense of anyone who looks calm because nothing has tested them yet.

Four faults, four specific antidotes — you cannot beat stinginess with honesty. The Pali of the first pair is akkodhena jine kodhaṁ — word for word, conquer anger by non-anger. Acharya Buddharakkhita keeps that bare negative, and his wording is why the verse is best known in English as “Overcome the angry by non-anger”. Sujato’s “kindness” makes akkodha an active warmth; Buddharakkhita’s “non-anger” keeps it a refusal. The verse in Pali is a bare negative prefix, and both readings are honest descendants of it.

Three verses with one skeleton, which is how the oral tradition made a teaching memorable. The repeated Pali word is pakopa — agitation or ill-temper — and it is applied in turn to body, speech and mind, the three doors of action the whole of Buddhist ethics is organised around. The order is deliberate and it runs inward: stop the hand, then the tongue, then the thought. Most anger practice that actually works starts at the same end.

Six Pali words that English calls “anger”

English has one main word here and the Pali has several, which is why translations of these verses diverge so widely. Every Pali form below is taken from the root text printed beside the translation on the same SuttaCentral page as the verse quoted; where a second translator is named, the wording is his.

So a verse about kodha is describing a moment, a verse about vera is describing a feud, and a verse about dosa is describing a permanent tilt of character. A page that renders all three as “anger” has quietly merged three different teachings. The third of them, dosa, gets its own line in a later chapter:

Four images for four defilements, and each image is chosen for how the thing behaves: fire consumes, a net entangles, a river carries you off. Hate gets gaho, and it is the one word in the line the standard translations split over: Sujato has “no crime like hate”, where Acharya Buddharakkhita reads “there is no grip like hatred” — hatred as the thing that takes hold of you. This is the verse that places anger inside the scheme of the three poisons, where it is no longer an episode but one of the three roots every unwholesome action grows from. The very next verse, on how easily we see the faults of others, is set out under “The fault of others”.

What anger costs: the Kodhana Sutta

The longest discourse in the Pali Canon given over entirely to anger is a short one with two numbers. Access to Insight prints it as AN 7.60, the Kodhana Sutta, in Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s 1997 translation; SuttaCentral prints the same discourse as AN 7.64 in Sujato’s. If you have been hunting for one and finding the other, that is why. Its frame is one of the most memorable in the canon:

The rhetorical move is to hand the argument to your enemy. Whatever your enemy would wish on you — that you be ugly, sleep badly, lose your money, lose your reputation, lose your friends — a short temper delivers, unassisted. The discourse then works through all seven, and notes that a person overcome by anger is ugly even when freshly bathed and well dressed. The verses that close it turn from cost to mechanism:

The claim is epistemic, not moral: anger is not condemned here for being unkind but for being blinding. An angry person cannot see what is good for them, and cannot see what is true — which is precisely why anger feels so much like clarity from the inside. Ṭhānissaro’s rendering of the same lines sharpens one phrase:

Where Sujato has the danger arising within, Ṭhānissaro has it born within — and adds “inflames”, picking up the fire image that runs through the Fire Sermon. Both are translating bhayamantarato jātaṁ (AN 7.64:12.3) — the danger born from within. The discourse does not end on the diagnosis:

Ṭhānissaro renders the same image as the snare of Māra rather than of death — the Pali maccu is death, and Māra is death personified, so the two readings are a hair apart. What matters is the verb. The remedy offered is not suppression and not venting but excision, and it takes four things at once: restraint, understanding, effort and a corrected view of the situation. Nobody in these texts is asked to simply feel differently.

When someone abuses you

Two discourses handle the case everyone actually wants help with: not anger in the abstract, but a specific person being vile to your face.

The setup is a meal. The Buddha has just asked the furious brahmin Bhāradvāja whether he serves food to guests, and what happens to the food when a guest declines it. The answer — it stays yours — becomes the answer about the insult. It is a teaching about ownership: abuse is offered, not imposed, and the one who refuses delivery leaves it with the sender. The full scene and its limits are worked through in Buddhism and anger.

The second discourse anticipates the obvious objection. Sakka has captured Vepacitti, lord of the titans, who insults him to his face; Sakka’s charioteer asks whether his master is putting up with it out of cowardice.

Note who is speaking: the victor, with his enemy in chains. The canon puts this speech in the mouth of the one party who could retaliate without risk, which is the whole point — patience asserted by someone who has no other option proves nothing. Later in the same exchange Sakka says the ultimate patience is a strong person enduring a weak one, since a weakling has to be patient anyway. Then comes the line the discourse is remembered for:

The accounting is one-sided on purpose: getting angry back makes things worse for yourself, whatever it does to the other person. And the discourse is honest about how this looks from outside — its last verse observes that people unskilled in the teaching take someone who heals both parties for a fool. That is the cost of the practice, stated by the texts themselves rather than glossed over. The training in it is patience, khanti, and the daily version is dealing with difficult people.

The hardest line in the canon

No collection of Buddha quotes on anger is honest without this one, which is the furthest the teaching goes and is almost never quoted on the pages that rank for this query.

The discourse is named after this image: the Kakacūpama Sutta, the Simile of the Saw. It is addressed to monastics, it is deliberately extreme, and the Buddha’s stated reason for the extremity is scale — he has just given four similes for a mind so vast that malice cannot mark it, like someone trying to dig away the earth, or paint pictures on empty space, or burn the Ganges with a grass torch. He ends the teaching by asking whether, holding this in mind, there remains any criticism his students could not endure. The saw is not a rule for lay life. It is a measuring stick placed at the far end of the scale so that everything nearer looks manageable — which is exactly how the discourse itself uses it.

Anger as venom drawn out

The Sutta Nipāta, among the oldest strata of the canon, opens its whole collection with anger.

Two snakes in two lines, doing opposite work. The venom is the anger — spreading, treatable, drawn out by a remedy applied in time. The sloughed skin is the practitioner, leaving behind something that was genuinely theirs and is now dead matter. Of the seventeen verses in this poem, anger is the one that gets the first position, ahead of greed and craving; the compilers of the earliest anthology thought it the first thing a renunciant would have to deal with. The medicine image is worth keeping: it treats anger as a condition with a course of treatment, not as a character flaw.

Where the traditions differ

Buddhism is not of one mind about anger, and the difference is not a matter of emphasis. In the Theravada Pali Canon, the five precepts a lay Buddhist undertakes say nothing about anger at all; anger is handled as a mental defilement to be trained, not as a rule to be kept. In East Asian Mahayana — the Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese schools, including the Zen lineages — lay people and clerics alike take the bodhisattva precepts of the Brahma Net Sutra, a text composed in China rather than translated from India, and there anger is precept number nine of ten:

The precept goes on to name harbouring a grudge against someone who has apologised, and classes the breach as a pārājika offence — the Vinaya’s term for a monastic’s gravest failure. For someone holding those precepts, a nursed resentment is not a lapse of temperament; it is a broken vow.

The Indian Mahayana text that shaped the Tibetan treatment is Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, whose sixth chapter is devoted entirely to kṣānti, patience. It opens by claiming that hatred destroys aeons of accumulated merit, then turns to what hatred does in the meantime:

Written perhaps twelve centuries after the Buddha, in Sanskrit, in a different tradition — and it arrives at the same evidence as SN 11.21: you cannot sleep. Śāntideva goes somewhere the Pali verses do not, arguing later in the chapter that an enemy is a rare and valuable thing, because nothing else can train patience. That is a Mahayana development, not a Pali teaching, and it is worth naming as one.

How to check a Buddha quote on anger yourself

Every line on this page has a reference, a named translator and a link, and that is the whole test. A genuine saying has an address: Dhp 5, SN 11.21, MN 21. An invented one has only other quote pages repeating it, usually in slightly different words each time — variability is the tell, because a real verse is fixed by its source while a slogan drifts as it is re-shared.

To check one yourself, take a distinctive phrase and search SuttaCentral or Access to Insight. Two cautions. First, English wording is not evidence either way: Dhammapada 5 exists in dozens of renderings, and finding a different one does not mean you have found a fake. Search for the idea and confirm the reference. Second, numbering differs between editions, as the Kodhana Sutta’s AN 7.60 and AN 7.64 show — a reference that fails in one place may be correct in another.

The canon set out this problem itself. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta the Buddha’s instruction for a reported teaching is to trace it in the discourses and verify it by the discipline, and to conclude it is not his if it cannot be found. We follow the same rule: if we cannot trace it, we do not print it. More of what survives that test is in our collection of sourced Buddhist quotes, and the practical teaching these verses belong to is in Buddhism and anger and loving-kindness meditation, the classic training for the quality Dhammapada 223 calls akkodha. For the state on the other side of it — santi, and the two other Pali words English flattens into “peace” — see Buddha quotes on peace.