Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! The competition for “Worst Fake Buddha Quote of All Time” has been categorically won by the following:
“Care about your children. Just bless them instead of worrying about them, as every child is the little Buddha who helps his parents to grow up.”
This particular quote is like one of those “Alpine Meadow” car air-fresheners: simultaneously sweet and putrid, and it bears as much resemblance to how the Buddha taught as the smell of one of those air-fresheners does to a genuine flower.
The quote is so awful that I expected it not to be very widespread, but in our post-fact world it turns out that in fact it’s all over the place. Many graphics have been created and the quote is listed in the usual quotes sites (as a writer on Wired said, “They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain.”) It’s even in an article in the Guardian, although so far I haven’t seen it in any books.
I don’t yet know where it originated. A review of a book called (brace yourself for another wave of nausea) “Mom, Dad, U R Wonderful” says that the book’s author, Salma Prabhu, attributes the quote to Osho, although there the quote is given, more sensibly, as:
“Care about your children. Just bless them instead of worrying, as every child is a little Buddha who helps his parents grow up.”
(The quote in the review ends with an exclamation mark. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.)
It’s possible that this quote is from Osho, but I haven’t found it in the online library devoted to his writings. Perhaps it was in a talk, or perhaps Ms. Prabhu was mistaken.
Osho, incidentally, has been responsible for a few Fake Buddha Quotes.