“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.”

Andy Rickford wrote this morning bringing my attention to what he referred to as a “ripe gorgonzola” of a Fake Buddha Quote:

“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary.
Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.”

This reminded me that I’d started a draft post on this over two years ago. Apparently gorgonzola doesn’t improve with age…

Andy wondered if this might be Taoist in origin, but actually this quote comes from a western source that you might not guess — Freemasonry. It’s from a book called

Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

So it’s not just western, but Scottish in origin, which warms the cockles of my Caledonian heart, although really the passage is an explication of the teachings of the Kabalah.

The Buddha did talk about duality, although not as much as you might expect, given how often that topic is discussed in modern teachings. As far as I’m aware he never talked about nonduality, although a kind of nonduality seems to me to be implicit in some of his teachings. At some point I’ll come back and say more about this, but having identified a non-Buddhist source for this quote I’m happy to declare it to be Fake.