Fake Buddha Quotes

I wish I could find an original source for this quote, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to. I’m 100% sure that this does not come from any Buddhist scripture, but is of very recent vintage.

I’ve found it in a couple of books, but the oldest of these is a self-published work called “Inspiration to Mankind,” by Bendalam Krishna Rao . This book is a collection of quotes attributed to the Buddha — many of them fake. There is no publication date in the book itself, but based on information in Google Books and Archive.org I believe it was published in 2014.

It’s all over the web. The earliest instance I’ve found so far is from approximately 2009, on a Yahoo Questions page where it’s not attributed to the Buddha but is simply described as a “proverb.”

If you find any earlier references, please let me know.

So at the moment I’ve no idea where this quote is from, who wrote it, or how it became attributed to the Buddha. The only thing I’m confident of is that the Buddha never said it.

The Buddha was a fan of silence. He said to his monks that when they gathered they should either talk about Dhamma (the teachings) or remain silent.

A particularly nice quote from the Sutta Nipata discusses how it’s the wise that are silent, while the foolish talk much:

Know this from waters’ flow—
those by rocks and pools—
such rills and becks gush noisily,
great waterways flow quiet.

What is unfilled makes noise
but silent is what’s full,
the fool is like the pot half-filled,
the wise one’s like a lake that’s full.

There’s much mention of space in the scriptures, largely because there is a meditative attainment called “the sphere of infinite space.” That’s not described as being the home of the awakened, however. In fact the Buddha found it unsatisfactory.

On the grounds of style and content this is certainly not by the Buddha.

I don’t know the actual origins at the moment, but it looks like a variant on “What’s done to children, they will do to society,” which is usually attributed to Karl Menninger, an American psychiatrist who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Menninger is often cited as having said this, but so far I haven’t been able to confirm that he actually did. The earliest reference I’ve found is in a 1979 book by Barbara Rowe, called “The Book of Quotes.”

I can’t offhand think of anything the Buddha said that relates to the idea that the way we treat our children becomes the way they treat others. But so that you can get a sense of how the scriptures are phrased, here’s part of the Sigalovada Sutta, where the Buddha gives a series of teachings to a householder, Sigalaka, whose spiritual practice involved paying reverence to the six directions (the four cardinal points, plus above and below):

In five ways should a mother and father as the eastern direction be respected by a child: ‘I will support them who supported me; I will do my duty to them; I will maintain the family lineage and tradition; I will be worthy of my inheritance; and I will make donations on behalf of dead ancestors.’

And, the mother and father so respected reciprocate with compassion in five ways: by restraining you from wrongdoing, guiding you towards good actions, training you in a profession, supporting the choice of a suitable spouse, and in due time, handing over the inheritance.

In this way, the eastern direction is protected and made peaceful and secure.

This one is also found as “The only way to bring peace to the earth is to learn to make your own life peaceful.”

This is one I hadn’t ever come across until it was sent to me, but it seems it’s fairly comment and is even found in a few books.

I’m not disputing the meaning of this quote at all, and neither would the Buddha. But it’s not the kind of thing that the Buddha said.

It’s yet another quote from Jack Kornfield’s “Buddha’s Little Instruction Book” (page 87).

Although many people have assumed from the title that the quotes in Jack’s books are from the Buddha, they are actually adaptations and distillations of wisdom from many sources.

I don’t know where Jack adapted this one from. Perhaps one of you guys knows?

In case you’re curious about why I say this isn’t the kind of thing that the Buddha said, it’s partly because of the language being too contemporary. The language of “the Earth” isn’t typical of language from that era, although it’s not unthinkable, since the word for the substance earth, which comes from a root meaning spreading out, also refers to the earth in the sense of the world. The Buddha would more commonly have talked of “the world,” although he tended to use that term in a fairly negative sense — as the experiential realm of pain and delusion

Also, “world peace” wasn’t one of the Buddha’s explicit aims, as far as I can see. His focus was mainly on encouraging individuals to escape suffering and find peace. He aimed to create a community that lived in peace:

Among hostile people,
free from hostility we dwell. (Dhammapada 197)

There is one long passage where the Buddha envisages a world that is peaceful and harmonious, and that is governed by a righteous monarch, so the Buddha talking in terms of world peace isn’t unthinkable — it’s just not likely and so acts as a bit of a red flag.

I found this one on the Facebook page of a South Jersey Buddhist group. Most of the Buddha quotes they have shared are fake. It seems that some people are preferentially drawn to the fake stuff, probably because it’s more literary and pithy than the actual Buddhist scriptures tend to be.

So this one’s not really the style the Buddha (or at least the early scriptures) used. And I can’t think of anything closely resembling this message, although I’ll continue thinking about that.

The earliest I’ve found this quote so far is from 1982, although there it’s “If you do not change direction, you are most likely to end up where you are going.” There (in “Science & Public Policy,” by the Science Policy Foundation) it’s said to be a Chinese proverb.

Later it was said to be by Lao Tsu. The writer Alan Cohen used that attribution in a number of his books and he may have invented it. Only later did it become ascribed to the Buddha.

The scriptures do have things like this:

It’s as if there were two men, one not skilled in the path, the other skilled in the path. In that case the man not skilled in the path would ask the man skilled in the path about the path. The second man would say, ‘Come, my good man, this is the path. Go along it a little further and you will see a fork in the road. Avoiding the left fork, take the right. Go along a little further and you will see an intense forest grove. Go along a little further and you will see a large marshy swamp. Go along a little further and you will see a deep drop-off. Go along a little further and you will see a delightful stretch of level ground.

As you can see, this is clunky and repetitive, which is what a lot of the scriptures are like. It’s not neat, polished, and ironic like our suspect quote. Having seen the contrast, you might have a better appreciation of why some people are drawn more to fake quotes than to real ones.

If I find anything similar to our suspect quote I’ll let you know, but I think we can safely assume that it’s fake.

I just came across this one on Facebook, on the page of a Buddhist community in New Jersey.

Most of the quotes I saw on their page were fake. Unfortunately this is rather common. It seems that many contemporary Buddhists aren’t very familiar with their own scriptures and don’t recognize when quotes are strikingly different in style and content from canonical teachings.

Most Buddhists seem content to rely on books by modern Buddhist authors. These often provide excellent guidance in life, but really we should be going back to the earliest sources so that we can develop a feel for how those modern teachings are related (or if they’re related!) to what the Buddha (probably) taught.

This particular quote — “It is better to do nothing, than to do what is wrong. For whatever you do, you do to yourself” struck me as being a little off. The first sentence seemed fine, but the second one sounded suspicious.

It turns out that this is from Thomas Byrom’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad translation of the Dhammapada, which also happens to be one of the most popular versions of this text.

It’s from the chapter on “Hell” (niraya) which Byrom renders as “The Dark.” Niraya is from nis+aya, meaning “to go asunder, to go to destruction, to die.” There doesn’t seem to be any etymological connection to darkness. But that’s Byrom for you.

These particular words are from Dhammapada verse 314. In Buddharakkhita’s translation this is:

An evil deed is better left undone, for such a deed torments one afterwards. But a good deed is better done, doing which one repents not later.

Byrom simply omits the second sentence of the original from his translation altogether. Again, that’s Byrom for you.

The part he does include isn’t as bad as many of his efforts. The original (of the whole verse) is, with my own translation, which makes no effort to be elegant:

Akataṃ dukkataṃ seyyo (A bad deed [is] better not-done)
pacchā tapati dukkataṃ (One is tormented by a bad deed afterwards)
Kataṃ ca sukataṃ seyyo (And a good deed [is] better done)
yaṃ katvā nānutappati. (Which, having done, one does not regret)

Compare those first two lines with Byrom’s “It is better to do nothing, than to do what is wrong. For whatever you do, you do to yourself.”

The first part is not entirely awful, although the original just says that it’s best not to do a bad deed, which Byrom’s statement, while true, loses this simplicity.

The second part is bad, though. The original is suggesting that you’ll be tormented by regret after doing a bad deed. It’s not saying that you’re doing the bad deed to yourself. Of course we could interpret the Dhammapada’s statement in terms of the consequences of your actions being something that choose for yourself when you choose the bad action. But that’s not what the verse actually says.

Thanissaro’s version of the whole of verse 314 is:

It’s better to leave a misdeed undone.
A misdeed burns you afterward.
Better that a good deed be done
that, after you’ve done it,
won’t make you burn.

You’ll notice that Thanissaro goes for “burns” rather than “torments,” which is fair enough. The verb tappati means to burn, to be tormented, to be consumed. Although on the whole I prefer Buddharakkhita’s translation, Thanissaro’s connects more strongly with the theme of hell. Although at the same time we shouldn’t make too much of the chapter titles of the Dhammapada, since its verses were originally independent sayings and were only later arranged thematically, and this “reframing” can change the way we interpret the word. It’s possible that in talking about remorse the Buddha wasn’t thinking about hell at all.

Anyway, to repeat myself, this is not Byrom’s most egregious mistranslation, although it’s very far from adequate. And if you’re a Buddhist, read the scriptures and buy good translations. Gil Fronsdal’s Dhammapada seems excellent.