It’s from a Japanese book on Buddhism called “The Teaching of Buddha.” This book does contain translations of Buddhist sutras, but it also inlcludes a lot of explanatory commentary, of which this is a part.

A fuller version reads:

“An act to make another happy, inspires the other to make still another happy, and so happiness is aroused and abounds. Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the single candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. Those who seek Enlightenment must be careful of each of their steps. No matter how high one’s aspiration may be, it must be attained step by step. The steps of the path to Enlightenment must be taken in our everyday life.”

It’s possible that the quote appeared with the attribution “The Teaching of Buddha,” with this then being misinterpreted to mean that it was the word of the Buddha. Several well-known Fake BUddha Quotes originate in this book.

There’s nothing at all unBuddhist about this quote. Often when I tell people that their Buddha quote is not in fact a Buddha quote they get rather annoyed and think that I’m denying the message conveyed by the quote, but whether a quote is true is separate from whether it’s correctly attributed.

The Buddha did talk about lamps (I don’t know about candles) and said things like:

“Just as an oil lamp burns in dependence on oil & wick; and from the termination of the oil & wick — and from not being provided any other sustenance — it goes out unnourished; in the same way, when sensing a feeling limited to the body, he discerns that ‘I am sensing a feeling limited to the body.’ When sensing a feeling limited to life, he discerns that ‘I am sensing a feeling limited to life.’ He discerns that ‘With the break-up of the body, after the termination of life, all that is sensed, not being relished, will grow cold right here.’”

As you can see, this isn’t very pithy or quotable!

A bit more quotable is:

As a flame overthrown by the force of the wind goes to an end that cannot be classified, so the sage free from naming activity goes to an end that cannot be classified.

But then this is rather hard to comprehend.

A later teaching — the Questions of King Milinda, has a similar analogy in reference not to happiness but to the teaching of rebirth:

The king asked: “Venerable Nagasena, is it so that one does not transmigrate and [yet] one is reborn?”

“Yes, your majesty, one does not transmigrate and one is reborn.”

“How, venerable Nagasena, is it that one does not transmigrate and one is reborn? Give me an analogy.”

“Just as, your majesty, if someone kindled one lamp from another, is it indeed so, your majesty, that the lamp would transmigrate from the other lamp?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“Indeed just so, your majesty, one does not transmigrate and one is reborn.”

This isn’t the Buddha speaking, but it’s the closest I’ve found to “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the single candle will not be shortened.”

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.
2. My life in bullet-points (again)
3. Fake Buddha quote: “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.’

“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 Osho’s commentary on the Buddhist Diamond Sutra. This of course brings up its own questions of whether Mahayana sutras constitute Fake Buddha Quotes. While we’ve no way of knowing whether the Buddha actually uttered anything that’s recorded in the Pali canon, we can be almost absolutely sure that he didn’t compose the Mahayana Sutras, although they were in many cases elaborations of his original teachings in literary form.

Here’s the part of the Sutra Osho comments on:

Subhuti, in these bodhisattvas no perception of a self takes place, no perception of a being, no perception of a soul, no perception of a person. Nor do these bodhisattvas have a perception of a dharma, or a perception of a no-dharma. No perception or non-perception takes place in them.

And why? If, Subhuti, these bodhisattvas, should have a perception of either a dharma, or a no-dharma, they would thereby seize on a self, on a being, on a soul, on a person.

And why? Because a bodhisattva should not seize on either a dharma or a no-dharma. Therefore this saying has been taught by the Tathagata with a hidden meaning: “By those who know the discourse on dharma as like unto a raft, dharmas should be forsaken, still more so, no-dharmas.”

The Lord asked: What do you think, Subhuti, is there any dharma which the Tathagata has fully known as “the utmost, right and perfect enlightenment,” or is there any dharma which the Tathagata has demonstrated?

Subhuti replied: No, not as I understand what the Lord has said. And why? This dharma which the Tathagata has fully known or demonstrated – it cannot be grasped, it cannot be talked about, it is neither a dharma nor a no-dharma. And why? Because an absolute exalts the holy persons.

That’s rather lovely, and mysterious, as the Perfection of Wisdom texts (of which this is an example) tend to be.

Here’s Osho’s commentary:

A few things to be understood, then it will be easy to enter into today’s sutra. First, the good doctrine, the dharma. Buddha calls a doctrine good if it is not a doctrine. If it is a doctrine it is not a good doctrine. Buddha calls a philosophy good philosophy if it is not a philosophy. If it is a philosophy then it is not good philosophy.

A doctrine is a set, fixed phenomenon. The universe is in flux; no doctrine can contain it. No doctrine can be just to it, no doctrine can do justice to existence. All doctrines fall short.

So Buddha says: “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.” He says: “I have only given you an approach towards reality. I have only given you the keys to open the door. I have not said anything about what you will see when you open the door. Nothing can be said about it.”

Just think of a man who has lived always in a dark cave, who knows nothing of light, who knows nothing of color, who has never seen the sun or the moon. How can you tell him about the rainbows? How can you talk to him about stars? How can you describe roses to him? It is impossible. And whatsoever you say to him, if he understands it, it will be wrong. He will create a doctrine and that will be wrong.

It’s clear here that this is Osho’s paraphrase of what he believes the Buddha to have been saying, and not the actual words of the Buddha himself. It’s easy to see how someone glancing at the page might think that these words were being presented as a verbatim quote from the Buddha.

This one so far hasn’t made it into any books, as far as I can see, but it is in some of the more popular quotes sites, and I guess it’s only a matter of time.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “It is better to travel well than to arrive.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “He is able who thinks he is able.”

“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 found in at least five books (in one it’s paired, rather ironically, with “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it”) although we can expect to see many more in the future, as the cycle of websites quoting books quoting websites kicks in. Ain’t the internet a wonderful thing — making it easier for misinformation to circulate.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “In order to gain anything you must lose everything”
3. Fake Buddha Quote #197: “When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”

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 Insight Meditation teacher and psychotherapist, Jack Kornfield. They’re found in his delightful work, “The Buddha’s Little Instruction Book” (page 79). It seems likely that someone has taken the book to be a collection of scriptural verses rather than Mr. Kornfield’s contemporary and poetic presentation of Buddhism. The title of the book quite unintentionally lends itself to that misunderstanding (which I’ve also noted with regard to quotes from a book called “The Teaching of the Buddha”).

I wonder if Jack Kornfield is aware of his promotion to full Buddhahood?

Incidentally, the first part of the quote is very similar to the words of the 4th century Greek poet, Palladas, who wrote “Day by day we are born as night retires, no more possessing aught of our former life, estranged from our course of yesterday, and beginning today the life that remains.”

In fact, the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo used the exact same wording as Jack Kornfield in his translation of Palladas:

each morning we’re born again
of yesterday nothing remains
what’s left began today

(Corvus: Poems, page 32).

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “It is better to travel well than to arrive.”

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’m happy to be the icon for self-reflection

and

The Buddha: Now it is you who are kvetching like a Jewish bubbe.

What can be confusing about a book like Stusser’s is that it contains a compilation of things the Buddha actually said, things Stusser made up, and recycled Fake Buddha Quotes that he no doubt picked up on the web. I’m not sure if even I can always reliably tell the difference (references to Seattle, Yiddish, and Victoria’s Secret aside). Some people will assume real Buddha quotes are Stusser’s fictions, while others will take some of the fiction to be genuine quotations.

But where did Stusser get his quote from? It’s floating around on the internet, of course, but the earliest book source I’ve been able to find was Elaine Parke’s 2001 Join the Golden Rule Revolution, where the quote appears full-fledged. Where did she get it from? Sadly, I just don’t know. Google is unfortunately not very good at letting us search for sources on the web by date; the results are often impossible (such as a Facebook or Twitter post being time-stamped February, 2001, although neither of those services existed at that time).

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”

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 on the web, so I haven’t been able to ascertain when “It is better to travel well than to arrive” became a Buddha quote.

A year before Broder’s book, Applied Economic Analysis for Technologists, Engineers, and Managers has the quote as a “Tibetan saying,” but (Google’s imperfections in ascertaining timing aside) it seems probably that the “Buddha” attribution was already in existence.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.”
2. Fake Buddha quote: “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.’
3. Fake Buddha Quote of the Day

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 done so) but the point is that the Buddha didn’t use that language.

And the Buddha just didn’t use language like “in compassion lies the world’s true strength.” The “world’s true strength”? I’m not even clear what that would mean, anyway. So my gut feelings tell me this is a genuine Fake Buddha Quote.

This one has murky origins, and the “quote has thickened” over the years, it would appear.

My first recourse in investigating such matters is Google Books. The first appearance I could find of “In separateness lies the world’s great misery” was in 1993, in Wayne Muller’s “Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood” (p. 155). But the second part of the quote is absent.

“In compassion lies true strength” (without “the world’s”) crops up first on page 108 of “Human Values and Abnormal Behavior: Readings in Abnormal Psychology,” by Walter D. Nunokawa: a book from 1965. But the Buddha isn’t mentioned. Of course it could be a complete coincidence that this phrase is similar to our Fake Buddha Quote. In fact I think it’s likely that it is a coincidence.

The full quote puts in an appearance in “Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun,” by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley (2002), where Gyalsay Rinpoche is quoted as saying, “Remember the words of Buddha: ‘In separateness lies the world’s greatest misery, in compassion lies the world’s true strength’” (page 79). Here it’s “greatest” rather than “great” misery.

The version with “great misery” rather than “greatest” appears first in “Let It Begin with You: Your Personal World Peace Guidebook,” by Viki Hurst, which has a quotes section at the back. I think we can assume that Hurst was the originator of this version, although she may have picked it up from a magazine or some other publication that Google has not yet scanned. I’ve found seven books that appear to have copied Hurst’s misquotation of “Sorrow Mountain.” These things metastasize rapidly once they get into circulation, and Google currently lists more than 4,000 web sites that contain that quote, the majority of which attribute it to the Buddha.

It’s possible that Gyalsay Rinpoche in “Sorrow Mountain” is quoting a Tibetan source, but I think it’s more likely he’s simply teaching what he understands Buddhism to be, and putting words in the mouth of the Buddha.

At present, therefore, I see no evidence suggesting that this quotation is canonical, and I’m reasonably confident in declaring it a Fake Buddha Quote.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “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.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.

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 genuine quote (it did more or less ring true), but with altered wording.

I did a bit of digging around and found the canonical original sitting on my bookshelf, in the Pali Text Society’s Gradual Sayings, Volume I. It’s in “The Book of the Threes,” and in full it runs like this:

Monks, there are these three things which are practiced in secret, not openly. What are they?

The ways of womenfolk are secret, not open. Brahmins practice their chants in secret, not openly. Those of perverse views [that's philosophically rather than sexually perverse views, I assume] hold their views secretly, not openly. These are the three things…

Monks, there are these three things which shine forth for all to see, which are not hidden. Which three?

The disc of the moon shines for all to see; it is not hidden. The disc of the sun does likewise. The Dhamma-Discipline [dhamma-vinaya] of a Tathagata [Buddha] shines for all to see; it is not hidden. These are the three things.

So “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth” is, pretty much, a genuine Buddha quote, although simplified. I’m pleased to have my instincts validated.

A contracted form of the canonical version dates at least to the early twentieth century. For example in The Essence of Buddhism by Pokala Lakshmi Narasu (1907) we see:

Three things shine before the world and cannot be hidden. They are the moon, the sun, and the truth proclaimed by the Tathagata

The resemblance is obvious, especially if we highlight the parts that the contemporary quote and the 1907 version have in common:

Three things shine before the world and cannot be hidden. They are the moon, the sun, and the truth proclaimed by the Tathagata

The word order has been rearranged (we nearly always say “sun and moon,” not “moon and sun”) and the word “long” has been inserted, but otherwise the two versions are identical.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.
2. Quote: “The roots of all living things are tied together”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “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.”

“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 a Gideon Bible-type publication by a non-profit organization called Bukkyo Dendo Kyonkai, which puts copies in every hotel room in Japan.

Now the problem with citing a quote from “The Teachings of Buddha” is that people are inclined to think that the quote is literally one of the teachings of the Buddha (i.e. something the Buddha said) rather than an explanation of the kinds of things that Buddhism teaches.

If I quote a bit more of the passage, you’ll recognize that on the whole it’s absolutely contemporary and not the kind of thing we find in Buddhist scriptures:

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.

Mathematical numbers from one to infinity are each complete numbers, and each in itself carries no distinction of quantity; but people make the discrimination for their own convenience, so as to able to indicate varying amounts.

Only a mention of quantum physics could render it more obvious that this isn’t a genuine Buddha quote.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote #197: “When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote: “The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”

“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 fine teachers; they’re giving poetic and contemporary expression to the Buddha-Dharma, after all. It’s just that if you only read books about Buddhism you don’t get that sense of when something is “off.”

And “The way is not in the sky; The way is in the heart” is most definitely off.

This is another from Thomas Byrom’s “translation” of the Dhammapada, which I’m quickly coming to realize is one of the two worst translations around, or that I’ve encountered. And by “worst” I mean 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.

Comparing Byrom’s verse with other translations and the original Pali is most instructive. Here’s the Pali:

akase padam natthi
samano natthi bahire

This is a straightforward translation (the Pali being very unambiguous):

“There is no track in the sky;
There is no ascetic outside [of this teaching].”

The language is straightforward, even if the sense if a little compacted (this is verse, after all). Here’s an expended version of the sense: In the sky, it’s impossible to leave a track. Birds fly through the sky and leave no trace of their coming and going. There is nothing in the sky that supports a track. Similarly, outside of the dhamma, there is nothing to support genuine spiritual practice.

Whether you compare the expanded meaning or the bare words, Byrom’s “translation” really has no relation to what the Buddha actually is quoted, in the Dhammapada, as saying (and we have no real reason to doubt that he said this, or something very similar). There is nothing about “the way” in the original. There is nothing about “the heart” in the original. Of course a translator may take liberties in order to communicate the essence of the original text, but here the essential message is entirely lost.

But of course “The way is not in the sky; The way is in the heart,” is beautifully resonant, and contains those evocative words “sky” and “way,” and “heart,” and so I’m not surprised that this mistranslation has gained wide acceptance as a Buddha quote, even though it’s utterly fake.

Here, by the way, is some information about Byrom, courtesy of Barnes and Noble:

Thomas (Billy) Byrom, Ph.D., was born in England and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard. He taught history and literature at Harvard and Old and Middle English language and Victorian and modern literature at Oxford, where he was first a fellow of Exeter College and then a fellow in American studies of St. Catherine’s College. His translation of The Ashtavakra Gita was published under the title The Heart of Awareness. In 1976 he moved to Kashi Ashram in Sebastian, Florida, where he served as president of the Kashi Foundation and as a spiritual elder and counselor for the whole community. There he cofounded the Ma Jaya River School, which he directed until his death in 1991.

It sounds as if he was a Hindu, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does leave open the possibility that he might see Buddhism through a Hindu lens. And there’s no indication in this brief bio that he actually studied either Sanskrit or Pali, although I suppose it’s possible he did and it was such a minor part of his studies that it escaped mention.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “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.”
2. Fake Buddha Quote #197: “When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”
3. Fake Buddha Quote: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity.