Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.

This is a genuine passage from Buddhist scripture: it is verse 5 of the Dhammapada, the opening chapter known as the Yamakavagga ("The Pairs"), part of the Khuddaka Nikāya of the Pali Canon and one of the most frequently cited lines in all of Buddhism. The exact English wording here — "Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal." — is the rendering of Acharya Buddharakkhita in The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom (Buddhist Publication Society, 1985), and it matches that edition word for word; other well-known translations, from Max Müller's 1881 "hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule" to Gil Fronsdal's and Juan Mascaró's versions, carry the identical sense with different phrasing, which is why the line circulates in many forms. Buddhist tradition holds the verse arose in response to a story of jealousy, murder and revenge, and it is credited to the Buddha as an "eternal law" of meeting hatred with non-hatred rather than retaliation. The Buddha left no writings of his own and the canon was transmitted orally for generations before being committed to text, so this is a saying preserved in and ascribed to him by scripture rather than a verbatim contemporaneous transcript — but for a figure of his era the canonical text is the primary source, and we found no credible competing author (a occasional loose link to Gandhi reflects his frequent paraphrasing of the sentiment, not authorship). On that basis we regard it as verified against its scriptural source.