bodhi tree swaying

I came across this one on Google+, where I’ve now encountered a couple of Fake Buddha Quotes, both of which were posted by the same person, interestingly enough:

“My doctrine is not a doctrine but just a vision. I have not given you any set rules, I have not given you a system.”

This isn’t from the Buddha, of course. It’s actually from Osho (Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh). Bhagwan was an Indian teacher who had a huge following in the west. He started a massive commune in Oregon, which ran into planning troubles with the local authorities because the ranch they owned, if I remember correctly, wasn’t zoned for the high density population that was living there. Bizarrely, the community decided to launch a bioterror attack on the local town by sprinkling salmonella bacteria in cafeterias and restaurants.

Not surprisingly, Osho was deported the United States, and the commune collapsed.

The quote is from …

This Fake Buddha Quote was forwarded to me today, and it’s one I’d never seen before:

“The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.”

This one’s quite straightforward: it’s from the Rg Veda (10:71) , which of course is a pre-Buddhist text that nowadays we’d say was Hindu, although the people of the Rg Veda would not have recognized that word.

This is, of course, found in many of the quotes sites that are found on the internet, and which as far as I can see take little if any care to attribute their quotations correctly. I’d imagine their primary motivation is to get traffic and earn money, and fact-checking would no doubt inhibit those activities.

The earliest dated misattribution I’ve found on the web is dated Jan 30, 1992, where it’s in the company of many other Fake Buddha Quotes.

It’s also …

Welcome to the first Fake Buddha Quote of 2011 (and on the occasion of my 50th birthday, no less).

A Twitter friend (someone I don’t know personally) tweeted the following the other day:

Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most. Buddha

As is usually the case, the language bears little or no resemblance to how the Buddha taught, which is not to say that the quote is false in its substance or lacking in poetry. It’s certainly a lovely metaphor, and in a sense true. It’s just very unlikely that these words are anywhere in the Buddhist canon.

Google Books brings up only a small selection (around eight) of books containing this exact quotation, and all but one attribute it to the Buddha. The one exception provides the correct source. These are not, in fact, the words of the Buddha, but are the words of the …

Marianne Marquez’ Why the Buddha Smiled — a book of photos accompanied by Buddha Quotes (many of them fake) — is the gift that keeps on giving, as far as this Fake-Buddha-Quote-ologist is concerned. Here’s one that immediately struck me as suspect:

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.
(original here)

The language of “renewing humanity” is just way off, and “life of service and compassion” is too contemporary for this to be a canonical quotation.

One later source (2007) is a book called The Dead Guy Interviews, by Michael A. Stusser. The book is fiction: it’s imagined conversations with famous dead people. The quote is certainly more quotable than some other excerpts from what the Tathagata shared with Stusser, such as:

The Buddha: I have many devoted followers in Seattle.

and

The Buddha:

…

I found this one on “BrainyQuote“:

It is better to travel well than to arrive.
Buddha

This seems to be a variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” (in “El Dorado”).

Arthur C. Custance made an obvious reference to this saying when he wrote, in his 1978 Science and Faith, “To distort a well-known adage, It is better to travel well than to arrive at the right destination.”

Quite how this came to be attributed to the Buddha, I don’t know. The earliest link I was able to find in print between the Buddha and the “travel well” variant of Stevenson’s quote is from The Panic-Free Pregnancy, by Michael S. Broder (p. 153), from 2004, where the author attributes the saying to “Buddha,” but I’d imagine that Broder got the quote from the internet. Unfortunately Google’s not very good at identifying dates of publication …

Again, my skills as a Fake-Buddha-Quote-ologist were called upon today. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

A Twitter friend asked me what I thought of this quote:

In seperateness [sic] lies the world’s great misery, in compassion lies the world’s true strength ~ Buddha

My gut response was that it stank. In my fairly extensive reading of the Pali canon (not to mention Mahayana Sutras) I don’t recall the Buddha ever talking about our “separateness.” It’s a popular topic of discourse in modern Buddhist writing (I’ve written about it myself in Living as a River) but the Buddha just didn’t use that language (or if he did, it’s not been recorded). He talked a lot about misery, but he talked of the origins of misery lying in greed, hatred, and delusion. Now I know you can interpret greed, hatred, and delusion in terms of separateness (again, I’ve …

My reputation as a Fake-Buddha-Quote-Buster is spreading. Today a non-Buddhist friend, trembling no doubt at the thought of incurring my wrath and scorn by posting a quotation erroneously attributed to the Buddha, asked me on Twitter whether “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth” was a genuine Buddha quote.

This is an interesting one. I’ve seen it around a lot on quotes sites and in books, mostly attributed to the Buddha (but once to Confucius and another time to Colin Powell) and it’s never rung any alarm bells. My instant gut response was it sounded like something the Buddha might have said.

In the exact form given above, the quote first appears in Google Books in a 2003 work, A Way Forward: Spiritual Guidance for Our Troubled Times, by Anna Voigt and Nevill Drury. The recent provenance made me wonder if this was still a …

This is another of the Fake Buddha Quotes that appeared in Tricycle’s blog yesterday. Tricycle managed to pull off the feat of having every single one of the Buddha quotes in an article be fake (some I’ve already covered, and the others I’ll tackle later), although Tricycle was in turn citing the work of an artist who combines quotations with images.

“In the sky there is no distinction of east and west; people create the distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.”

To be honest, this only barely registered on my inner Fake-osity Meter. The Buddha did use sky metaphors, but the second part, about creating distinctions in the mind and then believing in them, didn’t seem typical of the way the Buddha’s recorded as speaking.

Sure enough, the original source appears to be a book called “The Teachings of Buddha,” which is …

Thanks to Tricycle, a whole new batch of Fake Buddha Quotes has appeared on the same day, including the following:

“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”

Sadly, there’s no indication that Monty, who posted this (and others, including at least one I’ve blogged about before) recognized the bogosity of the quotes, but then that’s not uncommon. Every single one of the quotes on that Tricycle page that are attributed to the Buddha are in fact fake Buddha Quotes.

I suspect most contemporary Buddhists have read very little primary literature (a.k.a scripture) and rely on books about Buddhism. They therefore aren’t in a position to know whether a particular quote sounds like something the Buddha might have said, because everything they’ve read has been filtered through Jack Kornfield, or Sharon Salzberg, or Lama Surya Das. And I mean no disrespect to those …

Another Fake Buddha Quote has surfaced. It’s funny, but I don’t see as many of these as I used to. It may be that I’ve pounced on transgressors so often that people are now scared to post anything attributed to the Buddha until they’ve held the palm-leaf manuscripts in their own hands, and painstakingly translated every word themselves.

Anyway, this one’s all over the net:

“In every trial let understanding fight for you: Buddha.”

Jnanagarbha brought it to my attention.

Sometimes I dont know how I know a particular saying is a Fake Buddha Quote. You just feel it in your bones.

This one wasn’t hard to track down. First I found it attributed not just to “The Buddha” but to a specific text that I know well: the Dhammapada. And it was in the context of a verse I know well, from chapter three, “The Mind.”

But …

Really, I should stop giving fake numbers to my Fake Buddha Quotes. This one’s on Brainyquote.com.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

That didn’t look at all like something the Buddha would have said, especially since he mentions fate. The Buddha also, as far as I’m aware, never talked about what he “believed.”

A quick search revealed that the quote is actually from an essay by G. K. Chesterton, “A Visit to Holland.”

Well done, Brainyquote!

I came across this one in the feed of someone who started following me on Twitter. Here’s a link to the original status update.

When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky. ~ Buddha

This is course bears no resemblance to anything the Buddha’s recorded as having said.

With some Fake Buddha Quotes it’s possible to trace the origins to a bad translation or some other obvious misattribution (for example a quote appears in a book called “The Teaching of the Buddha,” is subsequently quoted and attributed “The Teaching of the Buddha,” and is then requoted as attributed to “the Buddha.” But this one’s rather mysterious. It simply starts appearing on the web about 2005. The first mention I have found so far is on Nov 29, 2005 on a blog. In 2007 it appears in “A Year of Questions,” …

I just caught this one on Twitter:

To gain heart you must lose everything. ~Buddha

I’m not entirely clear what this one’s trying to say, but the interesting thing is that it appears to be freshly minted. I’ve searched on Google for this quote with and without quotes, and haven’t found a trace of it. Usually these Fake Buddha Quotes have an extensive internet history, and often you can even find them in books. But this one seems to have no history. That makes it interesting, since it may have been newly minted or, perhaps, is so seriously garbled that a Google search doesn’t easily bring up the text it’s supposed to be based on.

@Lotuspad, who passed this on, attributes it to @rock_my_soles, but I haven’t been able to find the quote among the latter’s tweets. I suppose Lotuspad may have made it up, but

…

I saw it on Facebook; it must be a real Buddha quote!

DesireeGrace posted the following on Twitter this morning:

We’re the same as plants, trees, other people, the rain that falls. We consist of that [which] is around us, we’re the same as everything.Buddha

This is so totally alien to the idiom the Buddha used — and the concepts he used — that I assumed Desiree had made some kind of slip in attributing it to the Buddha, especially with the word “Buddha” tacked on awkwardly at the end.

But I wrote to her and she replied:

@Bodhipaksa But it is really a quote from the Buddha. I found it here: http://ktotheb.com/blog/2009/03/29/everything-is-spiritual/

I describe this as the “I saw it on the web so it must be true” argument.

This is an interesting quote since it seems to be relatively new. At least so far I haven’t been able to find it in …

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 …

This, sadly, isn’t that different from some of the stuff you’ll find attributed to the Buddha on many quotations sites.

HT to @nivarasa for this.

Seeing a Fake Buddha Quote on Twitter is pretty much a daily occurrence, but this one retweeted by a Buddhist particularly struck me this morning:

He is able who thinks he is able. #Buddha

What interests me about this one is that it’s being passed on by people who have “Buddha” or “Buddhist” as part of their Twitter usernames, and yet it strikes me as being profoundly unBuddhist. I’m always open to correction, but the Buddha didn’t strike me as being an advocate of “positive thinking.” The Buddha’s actual position seemed to be more, it doesn’t matter what you think you are, what is important is what you do.

The Buddha of course encouraged the development of ethically positive thinking, which is thinking free from greed, hatred, and delusion, and imbued with wisdom and compassion. But the idea that you can do something just because you think you can is one he’d …

Spotted on Twitter:

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
—Buddha.

It’s no doubt surprising to many people, since the terminology is a standard part of modern discussion about Buddhism, but the Buddha didn’t often talk in terms of “the present moment.” The closest I know to the quote above is a single reference in the Majjhima Nikaya (131), which says:

“You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.”

There is also however a passage where a disciple of the Buddha, Samiddhi, says the following:

“I, friend, do not reject the present moment to pursue what time will bring. I reject what time will bring to pursue the present moment.”

But …

Just spotted in the wild:

“You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself”
–Buddha

There’s nothing wrong with this — it just isn’t something the Buddha said.

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 …