Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioThe quote is on the mug in your kitchen cupboard, or taped to a colleague's monitor, or sliding past in a presentation between two stock photos: "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." It is attributed to the Buddha.
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The quote is on the mug in your kitchen cupboard, or taped to a colleague's monitor, or sliding past in a presentation between two stock photos: "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." It is attributed to the Buddha. It is quoted as the opening of the Dhammapada, which in a roundabout sense it is. The only problem is that the Buddha did not say any of those three sentences, in Pali or in any other language. An Englishman named Thomas Byrom wrote them in 1976, and a paperback reissue in 1993 carried them onto the mugs.
The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 verses in 26 chapters, part of the Pali Canon's Khuddaka Nikaya, and its opening verse has been established in the modern critical edition of the Pali Text Society, digitized by GRETIL, like this:
manopubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā, manasā ce paduṭṭhena bhāsatī vā karoti vā tato naṃ dukkham anveti cakkaṃ va vahato padaṃ.
Word for word, this is something like: mental states (dhammā) have mind (mano) as their forerunner (pubbaṅgamā), mind as their chief (seṭṭhā), mind as their maker (manomayā). If, with a corrupted (paduṭṭhena) mind, one speaks or acts, suffering (dukkham) follows (anveti) that person, like the wheel following the foot of the ox that draws the cart.
Put the published translations beside the mug text and the gap is obvious. Acharya Buddharakkhita's standard rendering, available at Access to Insight, reads: "Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox." Thanissaro Bhikkhu, translating independently, begins: "Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart." Gil Fronsdal's 2005 version, both readable and faithful, has "All experience is preceded by mind, Led by mind, Made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind, And suffering follows As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox."
None of these translators says anything about thoughts making the world. Bodhipaksa, who has been documenting fake Buddha quotes since 2003 at his Fake Buddha Quotes site, puts the philological case flatly: "There's nothing in the Pali original that mentions 'thoughts' or 'the world' at all, never mind that that we are what we think, or that our thoughts create the world."
Byrom did not invent the tradition of paraphrasing this verse. F. Max Muller's Victorian translation, first published in 1870 and reprinted in the Sacred Books of the East in 1881, already drifts from the literal: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." Bodhipaksa's note on this is direct: "There's nothing in the Pali about 'all that we are.'" Muller at least kept the second half of the verse anchored to suffering and the ox. The mug lineage is older than the mug.
But Muller's version still describes consequences. Byrom's opening three lines make a different kind of claim altogether: about identity, and about the world. According to Bodhipaksa's reading of the verse, argued in a Fall 2014 Tricycle article, the original makes "a psychological point, not an ontological one." The Pali says that mind shapes experience and that a defiled mind brings suffering in its wake. It does not say that you are your thoughts, and it does not say that thinking constructs the world. Those are additions.
Thomas Byrom was, as Tricycle describes him, "an Englishman who taught history and literature at Harvard and Oxford," and there is no record that he ever studied Pali. Bodhipaksa's assessment is blunt: "Byrom didn't know any Pali, and relied on others' translations and his own creative impulses." His book was published, honestly enough, as "a new rendering," with the Wildwood House first edition appearing September 12, 1976, and it carried the subtitle "The Sayings of the Buddha." That subtitle is where the trouble started. Once the lines were bound inside a book of Buddha's sayings, readers stopped checking whose English they were reading. (A note on the date you will sometimes see: the familiar Shambhala Pocket Classics edition is from November 9, 1993, which is why reference sites like Wikiquote cite "T. Byrom (1993)." The first edition was 1976; the pocket reissue is what put the book in millions of pockets.)
Bodhipaksa has also advanced a documented explanation for the flavor of the rendering, and it should be presented as his interpretation rather than settled fact. Byrom was a follower of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualist Hindu tradition, and toward the end of his life he translated the Ashtavakra Gita, a Vedantic text whose lines, in his rendering, run strikingly close to the mug: "You are what you think" at 1:11, and "When the world arises in me, It is just an illusion" at 2:9. Bodhipaksa says that "it's hard to conclude that Byrom, for whatever reason, was moved to present Buddhist teachings as if they were Hindu." Plausible as motive, but unproven.
His summary judgment on the rendering's method: "taking a look at the original Pali, and making up something nice-sounding that's loosely based on the words but totally disregards the literal meaning." The result, in his words, is "a beautiful fraud, like much of Coleman Barks' Rumi or Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam, but a fraud nonetheless." Tricycle's Winter 2018 fact-check column printed the compact verdict: "Verdict: Fake. Original Source: Thomas Byrom's (mis)translation of the Dhammapada (1976)."
The words on the mug are Thomas Byrom's English from 1976. The Pali verse beneath them says something narrower and, arguably, more useful: that mind precedes and shapes experience, and that a corrupted mind draws suffering after it like a wheel following an ox.
There is a canonical teaching in the neighborhood of the mug quote, and Wikiquote correctly names it: Majjhima Nikaya 19, where the closest line appears in Thanissaro's translation as "Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness." This is a real, citable doctrine of habituation: repeated thought tilts the mind. But notice how much more modest it is than "with our thoughts we make the world." It concerns the inclination of awareness, not identity and not cosmology. The Buddha, on the evidence of the Canon, taught that what you dwell on shapes what you tend toward. That is a claim you can live with even on a bad morning.
One more layer of honesty is owed here. The traditional commentary on verse 1, compiled in the 4th or 5th century CE and attributed to Buddhaghosa, attaches a story: "While residing at the Jetavana Monastery in Savatthi, the Buddha spoke this verse, with reference to Cakkhupala, a blind monk." In the tale, the blind elder paces in walking meditation, tramples insects unknowingly, fellow monks complain, and the Buddha rules there is no offence without intention. It is a good story, and it is legend, not history: the commentary postdates the verse by centuries, and the verse itself belongs to a collection whose earliest traceable stratum, in the view of Glenn Wallis as relayed by Wikipedia, reaches toward the third century BCE. The story explains the verse for tradition's purposes; it does not record why it was first spoken.
So when you read verse 1, you are reading a layered object: an old verse, a medieval story wrapped around it, and a stack of translations of varying fidelity on top. Muller loosened it, Byrom rewrote it, and the reference keepers have rendered their verdicts. For readers who want the verse whole, with the Pali respected and the context supplied, our own edition, The Dhammapada: Wisdom for the Restless Mind, gives all 423 verses in the traditional chapter order with notes, checked against Fausboll's 1855 critical edition. Fronsdal's 2005 translation is the other reliable option on the readable end of the shelf.
The mug, meanwhile, keeps selling. Byrom's lines are not worthless; as loose Vedantic inspiration they have their charm. They are just not what the opening of the Dhammapada says, and not what the Buddha said.
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