Fake Buddha Quote of the Day
Someone just brought this to my attention:
“Suffering, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the furthest shore.” – Buddha
This one appears in a CNN article.
It bears utterly no resemblance to anything the Buddha’s recorded as saying. As is common with Fake Buddha Quotes it’s really a kind of wish-fulfillment regarding what people hope the Buddha might have said. I simply don’t recognize in this “quote” anything resembling what I’ve come across in my fairly extensive reading of the Buddhist scriptures.
I sometimes wonder about the people that make these things up. What are they thinking? That the Buddha’s dead and gone and therefore it’s OK just to invent a statement and to claim that it’s something the Buddha said? The mentality totally eludes me. At my most charitable I can accept some genuine confusion resulting in this kind of mangling, but of course once a Fake Buddha Quote is on the loose there’s no stopping it. People who know nothing about Buddhism will start tweeting, quoting, and blogging the FBQ. Before long it will appear on some quotes site somewhere. Once it’s on a quote site the other quotes sites will copy it, because that’s what they do (I haven’t seen a single quotations site that cites sources, and they faithfully duplicate each others’ errors). Then the FBQ will appear in books of spiritual quotations and in innumerable self-help books. Who was it that said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. Oh yeah, wasn’t that the Buddha?
3 Responses to “Fake Buddha Quote of the Day”
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You’re currently reading “Fake Buddha Quote of the Day,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Nov 27 2009
Astonishing, isn’t it?! People make up and attribute quotes all the time. It’s amazing what Einstein and Mark Twain are supposed to have said.
So for those of us who haven’t studied a great deal of Buddhism, what of this is inconsistent with what Gautama said? For that matter, could any of these alleged Buddha quotes just belong to some other Buddha.
Course I think the quote is short cited in that suffering can provide a context where love may be challenged to go deeper and become greater.
It’s not even a question of it being inconsistent with what the Buddha said. For it to be a fake quote it simply has to be words that the Buddha isn’t recorded as having said and that have been put into his mouth. I could invent something, for example, that Shakespeare could have said and attribute it to him. It’s still a fake quote. In this case the language is entirely inconsistent with our records of the Buddha’s teachings.
How consistent this “quote” is with what the Buddha said depends on how you interpret it. From a Buddhist perspective there is nothing in this impermanent world that is capable of satisfying our longings for wholeness and freedom from suffering, and so we could say that suffering (or at least dissatisfaction) is what propels us along the spiritual path. I just wrote a piece today about how we wrongly search for happiness, so I won’t repeat myself here.