Solved: The Mystery of a Fake Einstein Quote on Buddhism

There’s a supposed quote from Albert Einstein concerning Buddhism that floats around everywhere on the internet and is found in many books. It says:

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.

It’s not surprising that this quote should be popular amongst admirers of Buddhism. Albert Einstein endorsing Buddhism would be a big deal. The problem is, no one can find any evidence that Einstein ever said this. It’s not in his books, letters, or speeches. No one recounted meeting Einstein and hearing him say these words in casual conversation.

In “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha” I quipped, “When quotations are anonymous or by figures who are no longer well known, it’s common for them to be reassigned to more famous figures … I predict that in the distant future all quotes from our era will be attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein—and of course the Buddha.” People tend, when misattributing quotes, to attach them to figures like Einstein or the Buddha, so that people will take them more seriously.

Although this quote was already known to almost certainly not be by Einstein, its origin has remained a mystery. Until now.

I believe that I’ve solved the mystery. In this case, the mistaken attribution — Einstein did not say or write these words — probably didn’t arise through dishonesty, but as the result of careless reading.

I tracked down this quotation to as early as 1964. I found it in fact in several publications dating from that year, including “Golden Lotus” (Vol 21, Number 5), “Metta: The Journal of the Buddhist Federation of Australia” (Volume 6, Issue 2), “The Maha Bodhi” (Volume 72), and “The Theosophist” (Volume 86). All were journals with a spiritual focus.

In all those instances, the quote ends with “Buddhism answers this description” and the words “If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism” are not found.

Using Google Books I was unable to find any instances of the quote earlier than 1964.

First, the almost simultaneous 1964 appearance of the quote in publications from around the world suggests that it was fairly new at that time.

Second, none of these publications gives us a source for the quote. It could well be that they were copying the text from each other; it’s generally more acceptable to leave a quote sourceless than it is to attribute it to a competing publication.

Third, there was almost certainly an original source that one of these journals was drawing upon. It’s not likely they would invent an Einstein quote.

Fourth, either the concluding words “If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism” are in the original source and were omitted, or they were not in the original and were added later. The wise money would be on the latter option; the missing part of the quote is particularly juicy, so why would these journal authors not include it?

We’re left, at this point, with no obvious “ur-text” for the quote.

Now, it does so happen that Einstein wrote an essay on religion, which was published in 1931 in a book called “Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms.” The title essay, “Cosmic Religion,” does not contain the quote we’re discussing, but it does touch on some of its themes. For example, Einstein talks about a “cosmic religious sense” that rises above the concept of an anthropomorphic god. Discussing the person who experiences this cosmic religious sense, Einstein writes that, “He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment, and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.”

There’s even a reference to Buddhism: “Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example in the Psalms of David and in the prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer’s magnificent essays have shown us.” Einstein tells us, “this cosmic religious sense … recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man’s image.”

Einstein says nothing about Buddhism being a “religion of the future” or being able to “cope with modern scientific needs.” Otherwise, however, the overlap is so great that I wondered if someone had summarized or paraphrased Einstein’s words, and this had been mistaken as a quote.

That turned out to be the case.

In 1958, a Japanese author, Masunaga Reihō, published a book called “The Soto Approach to Zen.” The book contains several chapters translated from Dōgen’s “Shōbōgenzō” (“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”), which is a collection of essays written in the 13th century in Japan. (They were originally sermons, I believe.) For a long time this early partial translation was the only English account of Dōgen’s great work. Now there are many.

Before Masunaga’s translations of Dōgen, there are four introductory chapters. Toward the end of the first chapter, on page 16, there is a discussion of science and religion, where Masunaga suggests that Buddhism successfully integrates the dualistic approach of science (humans, as subjects, studying the world as a subject) and mysticism (subject and object experienced as a non-duality). He makes a reference to Einstein’s words, not quoting but instead paraphrasing him:

Einstein says that the religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Converging both the natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.

Here is our quote! But it’s not presented as being a quote from Einstein. (There are slight, but telling differences: 1. Masunaga talks about “converging” both natural and the spiritual, while the version attributed to Einstein “covers” these two things. Masunaga’s original makes more sense. 2. Masunaga says that this cosmic awareness involves an experience of “all things” as a meaningful unity, while the Einstein version replaces “all things” with “all things natural and spiritual.” I find the original more succinct. 3. And there’s nothing in Masunaga’s writing that corresponds to “If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” This is neither Masunaga nor Einstein.)

Although he doesn’t directly reference it, Masunaga seems to be summarizing part Einstein’s essay, “Cosmic Religion.” He’s clearly paraphrasing rather than quoting Einstein. Although Einstein doesn’t talk in “Cosmic Religion” about “the religion of the future,” he does talk about the evolutionary path of religion rising above an anthropomorphic (personal) god and is devoid of dogmas. Einstein also discusses how the cosmic religious sense and the scientific sense converge: “I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

It’s not a particularly close paraphrase, but it does seem to be a paraphrase.

You’ll notice, however, that the words “Buddhism answers this description” are  not part of Masunaga’s paraphrase of Einstein’s writing. They are clearly his own words. They’re his own conclusion that Buddhism is the ideal fit for the characteristics of a cosmic religion, as outlined by Einstein. Einstein did not draw that conclusion. The closest he comes is to say that the cosmic religious sense is stronger in Buddhism than in earlier sources. He does not state that Buddhism is the cosmic religion of the future.

It seems that someone, at some point, took what Masunaga wrote after “Einstein says” and turned it into a quote. Presumably this happened in, or before, 1964, when there was the quote suddenly exploded into spiritual journals around the world.

Some Fake Buddha Quotes have also arisen from paraphrases; turning indirect speech into direct speech is a time-honored way of creating spurious quotes. It happened, for example, when Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) first quoted a Buddhist scripture and then offered his own paraphrase: “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 was then taken to be a direct quote from the scriptures.

Anyway, I’m reasonably confident that this Fake Einstein Quote arose from a paraphrase written by Masunaga, which someone carelessly took to be a quote.

The only mystery remaining is how “If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism” got added to the end of it. This seems to have happened much later, perhaps in the 1980’s or 1990’s, but I haven’t yet pinned that down. I found that phrase in close proximity to the rest of the quote in an essay, “Buddhism In a Scientific Culture,” in a 1971 edition of “Crystal Mirror.” But it’s not directly joined to it, and it’s not clear whether the author, Bryan Shekkeloff, intended us to understand the two quotes as continuous.  But they were certainly joined together not long after, since the complete Fake Einstein Quote can be found in Lama Surya Das’s “Awakening the Buddha Within,” published in 1998.

The sentence, “If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism” (here “would,” not “could”) is found attributed to Einstein in K. Sri Dhammananda’s 1965 book, “Great Personalities on Buddhism.” The earlier part of the quote, about Buddhism as the religion of the future, is also found in that book. Google Books does not allow me to see more than snippets, but the two parts of the quote are found on different pages, so they seem to have been regarded as two different statements that Einstein had made.

I said that the misattribution of this quote seemed more like a careless reading than an act of dishonestly, but perhaps the lines aren’t quite so clearly drawn. After all, the wording of the original paraphrase was changed. It’s more likely that this was done deliberately (which makes it dishonest) although it could just have been accidental (which makes it very careless indeed.

I imagine that the person who turned this from a paraphrase into a purported quote must have been aware they were fudging the quote, which is not an okay thing to do. Quotes are quotes. If you change them in any way, the ethical thing to do is to make people aware of that. Otherwise it’s no longer a quote, and you’re no longer being honest.

PS. Einstein never played electric guitar, either. The image is photoshopped.