bodhi tree swaying

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 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 of …

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 …

I’m not really going to post one of these every day. My title is as fake as the following quote.

“When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”

I came across this on Twitter today, tweeted by Buddha_Bones: “RT @Sharon_Phoenix “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.” ~Buddha”

This can be found in various books attributed to Jack Kornfield, the Buddha, and Shunryu Suzuki. As far as I can tell, those words first crop up in Saddhatissa’s “Before He Was Buddha: The Life of Siddhartha” (page 92) I don’t have the book and Google only offers a snippet view, so I’m not sure whether Saddhatissa puts those words into the Buddha’s mouth, or whether they are words that Saddhatissa says and someone else has mistaken them as the Buddha’s. If you have a copy of this book, please do let me know.

Like many …

• I have to confess I sometimes feel a bit despondent about where we’re going as a society, but then I see a video like this and I feel very hopeful. These kids just seem to love the physical act of singing, and of hearing themselves singing.

• A Fake Buddha Quote courtesy of Jnanagarbha, who received it in his twitter feed:

• "An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. Buddha."

…

Soren Gordhamer has a nice little article in The Huffington Post called "If the Buddha Used Twitter." It’s based around five quotations that he uses as guidelines for how to how the Twitter service:

1. Never allow yourself to envy others. For you will lose sight of the truth that way.
2. Better than a thousand senseless verses is one that brings the hearer peace.
3. The one who talks of the path but never walks it is like a cowman counting cattle of others but who has none of his own.
4. The conquest of oneself is better than the conquest of all others.
5. Your work is to find out what your work should be. Clearly discover your work and attend to it with all your heart.

His interpretations of these are generally very creative and sensible —

…

I read Zits every morning. Today’s was particularly funny, I thought.

• Liked this quote: "You cannot live an authentic life without mastering the art of disappointing people."  Cheryl Richardson
• And this one: "Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence." Eckhart Tolle
• But this is another fake Buddha quote doing the rounds on Twitter, quotations sites, etc: ” ‘If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change’ – Buddha.” The entire tone of that statement is so far from anything I’ve read in any form of Buddhist scripture that I’m astonished anyone familiar with Buddhism would think for a moment this is genuine. And yet I see Buddhists passing this quote on as if it were.
• It’s good to know I live in the land of

…

Fairly often I see quotes attributed to the Buddha that bear no little or no resemblance to anything that’s found in Buddhist scriptures. One example is from a Christian minister who hold’s meetings in prison at the same time I’m there leading my Buddhist study group. He informed me that the Buddha had said that a greater teacher than him would arise in 500 years, and that we should follow that guy instead. Guess who that would be. The pastor and I had an interesting conversation about the ethics of making up quotes to denigrate other religions and promote your own (not that I was accusing him of having invented the quote — but someone had).

A less egregious, but as far as I’m aware equally inaccurate one appeared on Twitter yesterday, posted by @tricyclemag. They didn’t invent the quote — I’ve seen it circulating endlessly, and it will no …