Adrian Rush sent me this quote, along with the comment following it:
“Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others.”
Sounds suspect to me. So many of these fake quotes going around make the Buddha sound like a 2,500-year-old version of Oprah. The Buddha’s philosophy merits more than being reduced to feel-good, new-age, fortune-cookie philosophy.
Anyway, I’ve been an armchair Buddhist for about a decade, and I’ve never run across this quote in my studies.
I think Adrian was right to be suspicious. I’m 99.9% sure this isn’t a canonical quote, and that at best it’s a paraphrase.
According to Frank MacHovec’s 2007 book, Buddha, Tao, Zen, “Be mindful of the kindnesses and not the faults of others” (note the absence of “always” and the use of “kindnesses” rather than “kindness”) was a saying of Master Chin Kung of the Amida Society.
Some of the sayings attributed to Master Chin Kung are actually from the Dhammapada, including the following one which may be the inspiration for the quote in question:
Do not focus on the rudeness of others, what they do or leave undone. Focus instead of what you have done and left undone.
This is clearly a rendition of Dhammapada verse 50, which in Buddharakkhita’s translation is:
Let none find fault with others; let none see the omissions and commissions of others. But let one see one’s own acts, done and undone.
Verse 50 of the Dhammapada is from a chapter called The Flowers, and another of master Chin Kung’s sayings is also reminiscent of verses from that chapter:
“Saying pleasant words without meaning them is like a beautiful flower with no fragrance.”
This is obviously drawn from verse 51:
Like a beautiful flower full of color but without fragrance, even so, fruitless are the fair words of one who does not practice them.
How the specific version “Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others,” with its addition of “always” and the change from “kindnesses” to “kindness” came to be, I can’t say. It’s in a book of “Buddha Quotes” (many, if not most of which are fake), but the book was published in 2013, and since Google says there are 25,000 instances of the quote on the web, the saying must have been around for a while.