Holding On To Anger Is Like

The hot coal simile does not appear in the Pali Canon as a saying of the Buddha. Researcher Bodhipaksa traced it to a passage in the Visuddhimagga (IX, 23) — the 5th-century CE commentary by the scholar Buddhaghosa, not the historical Buddha — which describes anger as being like picking up a burning coal to throw at another person. The popular English version was introduced by Joan Borysenko in her 1987 book Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, where she attributed the simile to the Buddha. The Visuddhimagga image is itself consistent with canonical Buddhist teaching on anger, making the sentiment, if not the attribution, authentic.