Another Fake Buddha Quote: “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”
I came across this ripe Fake Buddha Quote today:
The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground. ~Buddha
You’ll see this on Twitter, Facebook, and many web sites, as well as on incestuous and stunningly careless quotations sites like these:
Brainyquote.com
Quotesdaddy.com
Quotegarden.com
(I call quotes sites “incestuous” because they appear to copy one another’s quotes quite relentlessly).
Anyone half-way familiar with the Pali canon will know that the Buddha didn’t say things like that (or if he did, it’s not been recorded). The idiom is completely foreign.
So where’s it from?
A bit of searching revealed that it comes from Ernest Wood’s 1971 “Zen Dictionary” (page 91-92) where it’s part of the essay explaining the term “Naturalness.” The words are Mr. Wood’s, and not the Buddha’s.
Then the sloppy attributions start.
We have 1978′s “Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes,” by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht, which attributes the quote to “The Buddha.”
And then of course other authors start parroting the misattributed quote. “Slowmotional Meditation” by Colin F. Howard (1987) is at least careful to say that the quote is “attributed to the Buddha” but most others simply claim that “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground” is the word of the Buddha.
The Fake Buddha Quote is taken up by a sloppy quotations book (Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations, Issue 42) in 1990, hastening its dissemination and lending it an air of legitimacy.
Google lists over a dozen books that use the quote. When people see something in a book they may assume that there’s been some kind of fact-checking, but sadly it often seems that authors can attribute quotes without providing any source (except, perhaps, some other inadequately fact-checked book or a website).
The quote makes its way from books to websites, and to Twitter and Facebook. And thus another Fake Buddha Quote is born.
4 Responses to “Another Fake Buddha Quote: “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.””
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You’re currently reading “Another Fake Buddha Quote: “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Mar 21 2010
seems a little far-fetched and frankly false.
actually i like your use of adjective “ripe”.
But it still does have a meaning… i was looking for the meaning and not for arguments between believers of science and reiligion.
i agree it may not have been said by buddha but tell me what it means..
you are an intelligent man.. please tell me what it means..
I haven’t gone back to look at the original book, but I’d imagine it’s saying that when the foot touches the ground, what we feel is the result of sense-receptors in the foot itself, and not the ground itself. The Buddha did say things like “it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.”
The Buddha wouldn’t have denied the existence of the outside world, but he did seem to be suggesting that all we can experience is (if you’ll pardon the tautology) our experience. It’s not that we can’t know anything of the outside world, but that our entire experience of that outside world is filtered through our perceptual apparatus. The Buddha, to be sure, wasn’t much interested in studying the external world in any scientific way, but he was interested in seeing how we construct our experience, and how we construct the experience of distress (dukkha), so his focus was on the inner world of experience, and on its mechanisms.