Hatred Never Ends Hatred — ยาแก้โกรธที่ดีที่สุดคือเวลาHatred Never Ends Hatred — The Dhammapada, Horace, and Seneca on Anger

There is an unsent message in your phone. I am guessing — but guessing from experience. It was typed at 11:47 p.m., in the work group chat or the family one, after somebody posted a short sentence that was designed to hurt, or wasn't designed at all and hurt anyway. Your thumb answered with four paragraphs. Somewhere in them is the word "always". Somewhere is "never". Somewhere is a sentence that begins "Let me be honest with you," which has never once been followed by honesty. The cursor blinks after the last full stop. The send button is green.

You didn't press it. Not because you are a good person — because the battery hit four percent, or the baby cried at exactly the right moment. The next morning you read it again in different light. Every word is still there, but the person who wrote it has gone somewhere you can't quite name. You delete half of it and keep the other half "just in case" — and that kept half is what this essay wants to talk about.

Anger is an emotion with its own velocity. It arrives faster than any other feeling, and it promises to leave just as fast. But it has a relative who stays much longer. That relative is called resentment — the one who keeps the other half of the message "just in case". So the question I want to hold through this essay is not "how do I stop being angry" (as useless as asking how to stop being hungry) but a question about time: between the thing that arrives in five minutes and the thing that can stay five years, there is a gap in the middle. What happens in that gap — and who does it belong to?

Last time we talked about how love is an activity more than a feeling. This essay is about the opposite thing, and it will turn out to be the same truth. A Roman poet, a Roman philosopher, and a verse older than both of them by centuries will help answer. All three are saying one thing — in three different units of time.

Hatred never ends hatred

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.”
Na hi verena verāni sammantīdha kudācanaṁ; averena ca sammanti, esa dhammo sanantano.

Dhammapada 5 (Yamakavagga), tr. Acharya Buddharakkhita, The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom (Buddhist Publication Society, 1985)

This is the verse Thai people can recite without knowing they know it. It hangs on temple walls, on the sign outside the crematorium, in the comment someone pastes under a Facebook argument to end it (it never ends it). Familiarity has stopped us asking whom the Buddha said this to, and in what situation.

The Dhammapada commentary tells the story. The audience for this verse was two women — or, to be precise, a woman and an ogress. In the first of their lives, a barren wife found her husband a second wife, then could not bear it when the second wife conceived. She arranged the miscarriages; eventually the second wife died in childbirth with vengeance filling her chest. Then the two of them were reborn, hunting each other, life after life: as a hen and a cat, as a doe and a leopardess, until in the last round one was born a young woman and the other an ogress named Kali. The woman ran with her baby into the Jetavana monastery, laid the child at the Buddha's feet — and he spoke this verse to both of them at once^[1].

I tell the story because it changes the weight of the sentence. The verse is not addressed to someone who got angry five minutes ago — it is addressed to people who have been feuding for lifetimes. The Dhammapada's unit of time is "never, at any time," the longest unit human language has. And the word the Buddha chose is not "anger" but vera — enmity: anger that has been kept overnight, over years, over lifetimes, until it becomes a kind of relationship. The two preceding verses say exactly where enmity comes from: "'He insulted me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me' — in those who harbour such thoughts, hatred is never stilled." The Pali word is upanayhanti — to bind to oneself, to wrap up and carry. Thanissaro Bhikkhu translates it as brood, which is better than it first looks, because brooding is also what a hen does to an egg — and what is brooded on grows^[1].

Notice that the verse never disputes the facts. He really did insult you, really did strike you, really did take what was yours — the Dhammapada does not ask you to pretend otherwise, does not forbid anger, and does not forbid seeking justice. It says one thing only: what is bound does not loosen by being bound tighter. The commentary has an image I love: washing away filth with filthy water — the more you wash, the dirtier it gets^[1]. And the clean water, the "non-enmity", the commentary defines with a list: patience, loving-kindness, wise reflection. Warm feelings are nowhere on that list.

The commonest misreading takes this verse as an order to submit — to keep quiet, to let the guilty walk, to keep the peace at any price. That is not what the young woman in the story does. She runs. She carries her child to the safest place she knows. Then she listens. What the verse asks is not non-response but non-binding: defend yourself, make your claim — but do not tie the event into a knot around your own chest and carry it everywhere, because the one carrying it is you, not him. The ogress in that story had been exhausted for exactly as many lifetimes as the woman.

A brief madness

“Rage is a short madness. Rule your passion, which commands, if it do not obey; do you restrain it with a bridle, and with fetters.”
Ira furor brevis est: animum rege, qui nisi paret, imperat; hunc frenis, hunc tu compesce catena.

Horace, Epistles 1.2.62–63, tr. C. Smart, The Works of Horace

Around 20 BC the Roman poet Horace wrote a verse letter to a young man named Lollius Maximus. The young man was practising rhetoric in Rome; the middle-aged poet had withdrawn to the countryside to reread Homer, and wrote to say that Homer teaches conduct better than any philosopher. What is the whole Iliad, after all, but a story about anger — the anger of Achilles, the anger of two kings quarrelling over a woman while an entire army pays the price^[2].

Horace's famous sentence sits at line 62 of that letter, and it does not stand alone. Before it comes a catalogue of the mind's diseases: pleasure bought with pain, greed that never has enough, envy — of which "Sicilian tyrants never invented a greater torment". Then anger, with the warning people usually cut away: the man who will not rein in his mind will wish undone what he did — will long for it to be erased — even while he is rushing to punish with a hatred not yet satisfied. That is the context of brevis. The anger is short. What it does is not^[2].

So "a brief madness" is not a consolation, and it is not an excuse ("I lost it for a second, that's all"). Horace uses furor, the same word Romans used for actual raving, and he does not treat the raving with sympathy — he orders the bridle, he orders the chain, the way a groom breaks in a colt while its neck is still tender (that is the very next image in the poem). The poet's point is not that anger passes on its own. His point is that the short window is the most dangerous stretch of the whole day — short enough to feel harmless, and long enough to press send.

The line became a proverb almost immediately. A few decades later Seneca opened his own book on anger by noting that "some of the wisest of men" have called anger a short madness^[3] — a sentence that sounds like Horace word for word. Then Seneca describes the angry man's face for us: eyes blazing, the whole face flushed dark with blood boiling up from the bottom of the heart, lips quivering, teeth clenched, breath laboured and hissing. The Romans had no mirror good enough to show a man his own face in that minute, so Seneca painted it. We are luckier — we have front cameras, and almost no one has ever dared to use one right then.

The best remedy is delay

“The greatest remedy for anger is delay: beg anger to grant you this at the first, not in order that it may pardon the offence, but that it may form a right judgment about it: if it delays, it will come to an end.”
Maximum remedium irae mora est. Hoc ab illa pete initio, non ut ignoscat sed ut iudicet: graves habet impetus primos; desinet, si expectat.

Seneca, De Ira 2.29.1, tr. Aubrey Stewart (1900)

Seneca wrote De Ira — On Anger — in three books, addressed to his brother Novatus, who had asked him how anger might be soothed. Seneca tells his brother he is right to fear this passion above the others, because it is the most hideous and wild of them all^[3]. Book one describes the disease; book two is the medicine cabinet; and the sentence above sits in the middle of the cabinet — exactly where most readers skim, because they think they already know it. Count to ten. Everyone knows.

But Seneca's delay is not counting. Look at the words he chose: non ut ignoscat sed ut iudicet — not that it may pardon, but that it may judge. He is not asking anger to be kind. He is asking it to sit on the judge's bench instead of standing at the executioner's block. And a few chapters earlier he gives the reason: "The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured — a belief that should not be lightly entertained. … We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth" (veritatem dies aperit)^[3]. Delay, in other words, is about knowledge, not just pulse rate. You wait not to cool down but to find out what actually happened — was that message in the group chat meant to wound, or did you supply the tone of voice yourself?

Two more details from the same paragraph are worth keeping. First, ab initio — the bargain with anger has to be struck in advance, because once anger has arrived nobody negotiates with anybody. Second, do not try to pull it out all at once — "it will be conquered entire when it is plucked away part by part"^[3]. This is the advice of a man who knew how to be angry, not of a saint. And in book three he confesses his own method: every night, when the lamp has been carried out and his wife, who knows the habit, has fallen silent, he reviews the whole day and says to himself things like: "This time I pardon you — see that you never do it again. In that argument you spoke too aggressively; in future, do not argue with the ignorant"^[3]. My favourite detail is that even his wife knew the schedule.

My own view is that these three sentences are three clocks running at different speeds. Horace says anger is short. The Dhammapada says enmity is long beyond measure. And Seneca says the only tool we hold is the time between the two. I do not believe the enemy is the feeling of anger — anger is information; it says a line has been crossed, and it is usually right. The trouble is that we tend to act at the speed of the feeling and then think at the speed of the feud — act instantly, ruminate for three years. The whole art is swapping those two around. And I think forgiveness as a feeling is overrated, while forgiveness as a decision is underrated — which a certain man in a green rugby jersey understood better than anyone.

Mandela's number six jersey

Type Nelson Mandela's name next to the word resentment into a search box and this comes back, on a sunset background: "Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies." Some sites credit the Buddha, some credit Mandela. The truth is it belongs to neither. No verse of the Dhammapada uses poison in this sense, and no record of Mandela contains the sentence. The Quote Investigator website traced the family tree: the closest early form appears in 1980, in a book by the Catholic writer Bert Ghezzi, with looser relatives circulating in sermons and advice columns since the early twentieth century — and, above all, in the meeting rooms of the recovery movement, where the saying was passed from chair to chair. Mandela's name was only attached in 2002^[4]. So the line is a truth with no owner — which makes it no less true, but it does mean we should look at what Mandela did, instead of at what he never said.

He walked out of prison in 1990, after twenty-seven years inside, and became president in 1994. The following year South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup, and the problem was rugby itself. For most Black South Africans the Springboks were the white man's team; the springbok on the chest was the emblem of the regime that had just fallen. Mandela's own ANC wanted the emblem replaced with the protea, the national flower, and from 1992 the jersey carried a protea alongside the springbok as a compromise. Mandela intervened — not to abolish the emblem, but to take it and make it everyone's^[5].

On 24 June 1995, at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, South Africa met New Zealand in the final. Before kickoff the president walked into the team's changing room wearing a green Springbok jersey with a number six on the back — the number of François Pienaar, the captain — and a team cap. He told Chester Williams, the only player in the squad who was not white: "I'm proud of you. Go make the rest of South Africa proud too." South Africa won 15–12 in extra time, on a drop goal, and the picture the world remembers is Mandela in the number six jersey handing Pienaar the cup. Williams said of that day: "Everyone was so happy. White, black, everyone. That day we all became legends."^[5]

The jersey is the part everyone retells, but it was one fixture in a longer season. When the National Sports Council later wanted the protea as the sole emblem for every national team, Mandela went and stood in front of them: "There is a real possibility that if we review our decision and accept the Springbok for rugby as our symbol, we will unite our country as never before." The council voted to keep the springbok for rugby in March 1996^[5]. And in November 1995 he invited Percy Yutar to lunch — the prosecutor who had tried him at Rivonia in 1963–64, the man who had asked the court to bring the full weight of the law down on him. After the meal Yutar called the president "a saintly man". Mandela said Yutar had only been doing a prosecutor's job^[6].

Two things are worth noticing. First, none of this is a feeling. It is a schedule. The jersey was chosen in advance; the invitation was sent; the speech was written. What Mandela did was Seneca's delay stretched across twenty-seven years — judge first, decide, then act; if the feeling comes, it comes last of all. In his autobiography he wrote the sentence that actually is his, and that deserves the sunset background instead of the poison one: "No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."^[6] Hatred is a skill — which means unlearning it is a curriculum.

Second, let us say it straight: it was also politics. He needed the white minority, who had just lost their flag and their anthem, to stay in the country. Saints do not count votes; presidents do. And I do not think that shrinks the story — the opposite. It makes it usable by ordinary people, because the Dhammapada's non-enmity never asked you to feel anything in particular. It asks you to stop binding, and to go do something more useful instead — such as putting on the other side's jersey and walking out into their stadium.

What the research says — and doesn't

The belief modern research has demolished most cleanly is catharsis — the theory that anger is pressure in a vessel, and that punching a pillow lets it out. In 2002 Brad Bushman angered students with an insulting critique of their essays, then had one group hit a punching bag while picturing the critic's face, another group hit the bag while thinking about fitness, and a third group sit and do nothing. Result: the face-picturing group ended up the angriest and the most aggressive; the do-nothing group the calmest. Bushman's summary reads like Seneca: doing nothing at all was more effective than venting^[7]. The limits are real — a laboratory, students, aggression measured with noise blasts in a game. But the finding does not stand alone. In 2024 Bushman and Sophie Kjærvik pooled 154 studies with more than ten thousand participants and sorted anger-management activities into two kinds: those that lower the body's arousal (slow breathing, relaxation, mindfulness, meditation) and those that raise it (hitting a bag, jogging, cycling). The first kind reduced anger and aggression reliably, across genders, ages and cultures; the second kind, overall, did nothing at all^[9]. Running is not wrong — it is simply not an anger medicine. As Horace said: a bridle, not a whip.

The study that turned Dhammapada verses 3–4 into a laboratory variable came from Cheryl Rusting and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema in 1998. They made people angry, then had half of them ruminate on the incident and half distract themselves. Across three experiments: rumination increased anger; distraction decreased it or left it unchanged^[8]. "Harbouring enmity" in Pali and rumination in the psychologists' vocabulary are the same word — replaying the same tape with no new information. What the study does not say matters just as much: it measured mood over minutes, and distraction is not suppression, which is a different literature of its own.

And can forgiveness be trained? Everett Worthington, who spent a career on the question, designed a five-step procedure called REACH: Recall the hurt accurately; Empathize — try the account from the other person's chair; Altruistic gift — see forgiveness as the kind of gift you have received from others before; Commit — decide, and declare the decision to yourself; Hold on — prepare for the day the old feeling returns^[10]. In 2014 Nathaniel Wade and colleagues pooled 54 studies with over two thousand participants: forgiveness programmes increased forgiveness more than doing nothing, by a moderate margin (about 0.56), and slightly more than other therapies not aimed at forgiveness (about 0.45); longer practice worked better, and one-to-one beat groups^[10]. The caveats have to be said: most participants were volunteers who already wanted to forgive, forgiveness was measured by their own report, and the narrower gap against other therapies suggests part of the effect is simply sitting down with someone and a structure — not magic in the five steps.

And there is what none of this research says. No study says anger is wrong. No study says you owe anyone forgiveness. No study tells you to stay where you are being harmed. They measure moods over weeks, not justice over years. On one point only do they all agree — and it is the point the young woman and the ogress heard first: whatever you replay in your head is the thing you are training to be strong.

Try it this week

This experiment does not ask you to be less angry. It only asks you to change speed.

If your body needs to do something in that minute — and it usually does — choose something slower, not faster. Ten breaths with the exhale longer than the inhale. Walk to refill the water bottle. Wash one dish. Do not punch the pillow: ten thousand participants say the pillow does not help, and the pillow never did anything to you.

Ask yourself again on Sunday

On Sunday, open the notes app and scroll back to Monday night's message. 23:47. Read it again. I suspect you will find what Horace described two thousand years ago — a sentence you wish had never been written. And you will feel a small, strange relief, because an unsent draft is the one place in life where "I wish it had never happened" costs nothing. The person who wrote it was genuinely angry, and may even have been right. But he only got five minutes. The person who would have had to live with the message for five years is you.

The very next verse — Dhammapada 6 — the Buddha spoke to the monks of Kosambi, whose quarrel had split the monastery in two. He does not mention enmity at all. He reaches for a different unit of time: "Others do not realise that we here are on the verge of perishing. Those who realise it — their quarrels are stilled."^[1] Remember that everyone in that group chat, including you, is going to die, and the argument changes size on its own. That is the last unit of time in this series, and it is the subject of the next essay: memento mori.