You Will Not Be Punished For

"You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger" is not found in any Buddhist scripture. Researcher Bodhipaksa traced its origin to a 1993 paraphrase by Eknath Easwaran — who wrote without quotation marks that "the Buddha says we are not punished for our anger, we are punished by it" — which was then converted into a fake direct quote and attributed to the Buddha from 1995 onward. The underlying idea — that anger harms the angry person most — does appear in canonical texts, including the Visuddhimagga's image of anger as burning coal (see also quote 383).