Category: Fake Buddha Quotes

Thanks to Tricycle, a whole new batch of Fake Buddha Quotes has appeared on the same day, including the following:

“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 is in fact a fake Buddha Quote.

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.

Also seen as:

To gain heart you must lose everything. ~Buddha

I’m not entirely clear what this one’s trying to say, but the interesting thing is that it appears to be freshly minted. I’ve searched on Google for this quote with and without quotes, and haven’t found a trace of it. Usually these Fake Buddha Quotes have an extensive internet history, and often you can even find them in books. But this one seems to have no history. That makes it interesting, since it may have been newly minted or, perhaps, is so seriously garbled that a Google search doesn’t easily bring up the text it’s supposed to be based on.

@Lotuspad, who passed this on, attributes it to @rock_my_soles, but I haven’t been able to find the quote among the latter’s tweets. I suppose Lotuspad may have made it up, but that seems too good to be true.

It’s a strange case. The closest I’ve found has been "It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.," attributed to Brad Pitt in the film Fight Club. But intriguingly, the poet Jane Hirshfield trots out a similar phrase — "In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything" in a preview to the recent PBS special, The Buddha.

And sure enough, @anniebissett Tweets, the night of the PBS special, "In order to gain anything you must lose everything. -Buddha." Something said by a woman on a PBS program is now promoted to Buddhasāsana — the word of the Buddha — and a Fake Buddha Quote Is Born.

But how, or even if, we get from that to "To gain heart you must lose everything," I just don’t know.

Update: With a bit more detective work, and a chat with the very charming @rock_my_soles, I’ve found that she was actually quoting the PBS show, although evidently she misheard the quote. @rock_my_soles suggested that I have a Real Buddha Quote category on my blog, in which I cite my sources. I think that’s a smashing idea, and I’ll take her (I think it’s a her) up on her suggestion.

“I saw it on Facebook; it must be a real Buddha quote!”

DesireeGrace posted the following on Twitter this morning:

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.Buddha

This is so totally alien to the idiom the Buddha used — and the concepts he used — that I assumed Desiree had made some kind of slip in attributing it to the Buddha, especially with the word “Buddha” tacked on awkwardly at the end.

But I wrote to her and she replied:

@Bodhipaksa But it is really a quote from the Buddha. 🙂 I found it here: http://ktotheb.com/blog/2009/03/29/everything-is-spiritual/

Although she was probably joking, I describe this as the “I saw it on the web so it must be true” argument.

This is an interesting quote since it seems to be relatively new. At least so far I haven’t been able to find it in Google Books, where a lot of Fake Buddha Quotes have their origins. However, Google says that there are 490 web pages that contain the first words of the quote: “”We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls.”

I think it’s quite possible that the quote started life here, an SFSU web page, mainly because it’s not attributed to the Buddha, but is part of a paraphrase of the Buddha’s teachings. This web page (according to archive.org) goes back at least to 2000, which probably makes it old enough to be the urtext for this particular Fake Buddha Quote. We may never know who the first person was to lift this quote and mistakenly attribute it to he Buddha himself.

It’s only a matter of time now until this Fake Buddha Quote makes in onto one of the many Quotes sites that deface the internet. Once it’s on one, it’ll be copied to the others. And then it’ll start appearing in books, lending the quote a false air of authority.

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 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. Think about it: what’s the easiest way to build up your quotes site? Easy. Copy the quotes from another site. It’s easier than doing actual research involving primary text, or even reputable sources.

Anyone half-way familiar with the Pali canon will know that the Buddha isn’t recorded as having said things like that. 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 to “The Buddha.”

And then of course other authors start repeating the misattributed quote. “Slowmotional Meditation” by Colin F. Howard (1987) is at least careful to say that the quote is “attributed to the Buddha” but most others simply claim that “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground” is the word of the Buddha.

The Fake Buddha Quote is taken up by a sloppy quotations book (Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations, Issue 42) in 1990, hastening its dissemination and lending it an air of legitimacy.

Google lists over a dozen books that use the quote. When people see something in a book they may assume that there’s been some kind of fact-checking, but sadly it often seems that authors can attribute quotes without providing any source (except, perhaps, some other inadequately fact-checked book or a website).

Then Hollywood steps in, and the quote is attributed to the Buddha in A Wrinkle In Time, which I understand is an excellent movie. It’s a shame about the fact-checking, though.

And so a quote makes its way from books to websites, and to Twitter and Facebook, and into movies. Rinse and repeat. And thus another Fake Buddha Quote circulates endlessly.

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 have seen as being itself delusional.

In fact when we look around at the world it seems self-evident that it’s full of people who over-estimate their abilities. And this has been well-studied by psychologists. Here’s an article on why we overestimate our competence, for example.

It’s curious that so many Buddhists promote views as being the words of the Buddha when actually they’re in an idiom that’s completely foreign to actual Buddhist teachings, and when the content is also alien to Buddhist thought and practice. I suspect a lot of Buddhists aren’t very familiar with actual scriptures, and rely on books about Buddhism. This would explain why so many non-Buddhist sayings are passed off as being the word of the Buddha.

Where does that quote–“He is able who thinks he is able”–actually come from? It’s not actually New Age at all. Originally, the earliest uses I was able to find were in books published in 1965 and 1972, where it’s described as “an ancient Roman saying.” It does have that muscular ring of empire about it! It’s also in a book from 1937 as well, “Guiding Your Life with Psychology as a Key,” by Josephine Agnes Jackson but no citation is given.

The Latin phrase being translated here is “Potest qui vult,” which is he who wills, is able. That is of course entirely different from “He is able who thinks he is able,” so the saying being ascribed to the Buddha is also being mistranslated from the Latin.

Spotted on Twitter:

The quote in question comes from “The Teaching of Buddha: The Buddhist Bible : A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from the Japanese,” published in 1934 by The Federation of All Young Buddhist Associations of Japan.

It’s in a section titled “Sacred Aphorisms,” many of which are recognizable as quotes from the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada quotes are unnumbered, which makes them tricky to identify at times, but this seems to be a rendition of verse 348:

Munca pure munca pacchato
majjhe munca bhavassa paragu
sabbattha vimuttamanaso
na punam jatijaram upehisi.

My literal translation of this would be:

Let go of the past, let go of the future.
Let go of the present. Having gone beyond becoming,
with mind completely freed,
you will never again come to birth and aging.

Buddharakkhita’s translation is:

Let go of the past, let go of the future,
let go of the present, and cross over to the farther shore of existence.
With mind wholly liberated,
you shall come no more to birth and death.

This is very different from “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” The first two clauses (“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future”) , although poetic, are accurate, but the third (“concentrate the mind on the present moment”) is a significant distortion of what the Dhammapada literally says. I’m not arguing there’s anything wrong with concentrating the mind on the present moment — far from it. But the essential message, that none of our experience is to be clung to, gets lost.

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 often talk in terms of “the present moment” or “concentrating on the present moment.” The closest I know to the quote above (although see my “Postscript” below) is a single reference in the Bhaddekaratta Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya, 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.”

Or in Thanissaro’s translation, this same saying is:

“My friend, I’m not dropping what’s visible here-and-now in pursuit of what’s subject to time. I’m dropping what’s subject to time in pursuit of what’s visible here-and-now.”

Thus, the message of the suspect quote is not something to quibble with. It’s always a judgment call when it comes to translations that take liberties with the text. Sometimes I’m happy to go with a translator’s creative take on the original. But in this case I regard this quote as different enough from the original that it’s effectively a Fake Buddha Quote.

Postscript

However! Niklas (see comment below) pointed me to the Arañña Sutta of the Samyutta Nikaya, which includes the following verse:

They do not mourn for the past,
They do not yearn for the future,
They live on the present;
Therefore they are of good complexion.
(My translation)

The Pali is:

Atītaṃ nānusocanti nappajappanti’nāgataṃ,
Paccuppannena yāpenti tena vaṇṇo pasīdati.

This is a reply to a question put by a deva to the Buddha, in which he is asked why the forest dwellers, living on one meal a day, have such good complexions.

The reply is something of a pun, since “yāpeti” means “to go” or “to dwell” (a synonym of viharati) but it can also mean to “live on” food. So the deva who asks the question talks about the monks eating one meal a day, and the Buddha responds by talking about how the monks “live on” the present moment. As far as I’m aware this isn’t a common usage, and the pun doesn’t really work well in English.

The suspect quote in question (“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment”), while close in meaning to the Arañña Sutta, isn’t a translation of it. But this is an interesting moment in the excavation of Fake Buddha Quotes — where we find a quote from one sutta that is not faithful to the original but which accidentally ends up being close to another sutta.

Just spotted in the wild:

“You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself”
–Buddha

This seems to be from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s “Voice of the Silence,” which has,

Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become that Path itself.

Blavatsky was a founder of Theosophy and in 1880 became one of the first westerners to convert to Buddhism. She was strongly interested in spiritualism, and accusations of fraud followed her her entire life. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that she was a talented charlatan, although she may have been a well-meaning one in that she hoped to turn people’s attention toward spirituality.

One of the means for achieving this was to write books that purported to be translations from mystical Eastern works. The Voice of the Silence, And Other Chosen Fragments from the “Book of the Golden Precepts”, published in 1889, was one such work.

Blavatsky wrote in a faux-antique style, full of “thees” and “thous,” and her writings bear very little resemblance to Buddhist teachings. For example, the lines immediately preceding our Fake Buddha Quote are:

Ere thy Soul’s mind can understand, the bud of personality must be crushed out; the worm of sense destroyed past resurrection.

And there are things like this:

Saith the Great Law: “In order to become the KNOWER of ALL SELF, thou has first of SELF to be the knower.” To reach the knowledge of that SELF, thou hast to give up Self to Non-Self, Being to Non-Being. (Hysterical ALL CAPS in original.)

Despite Blavatsky having used a smattering of Buddhist termininology, her model for spirituality seems to have been primarily Hindu, given her belief in a universal self (sorry, SELF) to which we must surrender our “selves.”

There’s also some straightforward teaching, such as “Shun praise, O Devotee. Praise leads to self-delusion.” I suspect most of this practical advice was made up rather than copied from any actual spiritual text.

This quote is rather similar to “There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.”

“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.

The quote is actually from Jack Kornfield’s “Buddha’s Little Instruction Book,” page 5. I rather suspect he’s the originator of this quote since, like most of the quotes in that book, this one is not actually a quote from the Buddha.

In its full form in BLIB the quote is “Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are
both true and kind, they can change our world.”

Like many Fake Buddha Quotes, this one has a nice sentiment. The Buddha often talked about the virtue of words being true and kind, but the language of “changing the world” is not something the Buddha is recorded as using.

A rather nice passage from the Sigalovada Sutta (famous for being the most systematic teaching that is directed at householders) says:

Generosity and kind words,
Conduct for others’ welfare,
Impartiality in all things;
These are suitable everywhere.

These kind dispositions hold the world together,
Like the linchpin of a moving chariot.

This includes mention of kind words and of holding the world together, although it doesn’t mention truthful speech.

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."

It’s actually fairly Buddhist in spirit, but in tone it’s very unlike any Buddhist scripture I’ve ever come across. Sure enough, it’s found attributed to the Buddha in any number of quotes sites, and it’s likewise listed in a number of books in Amazon. A little investigation, however, showed this to be a quote from page 47 of Edward de Bono’s book, "Serious Creativity: Using The Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas."