It’s wonderful that people are moved to share inspiring and thought-provoking quotes, and I celebrate that generosity of spirit. I love how we yearn to encounter words of wisdom. I love how we resonate with them. I love how we instinctively recognize we’re in the presence of a perspective truer and deeper than our normal way of seeing things, and expressed more elegantly than the mundane communication to which we’re usually exposed.
I also love the Buddha’s teaching. Because of this love I’d like to see us represent him and other teachers in their own terms, and not impose a distorted lens of misinformation between them and us. Some of the quotes we’ve seen are benign paraphrases, but others present the Buddha as an exponent of rationalism, or Hinduism, or the Law or Attraction or other forms of New Thought. Even sincerely practicing Buddhists can have difficulty disentangling these non-Buddhist perspectives from the Dharma the Buddha actually taught.
I encourage all Buddhist practitioners to spend time imbibing the scriptures. Most of us get started by reading books written by modern teachers such as Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chödrön, Lama Surya Das, and so on. These writers present Buddhist practice in accessible language and on the basis of considerable personal experience. They are wise and insightful teachers. But if we don’t get a feel for the content and style of the original scriptures, we’re vulnerable to being taken in by fake quotes.
I’m perplexed when people write and tell me that accurate attributions and translations aren’t important, and that the only things that matter are whether quotes are true and how they make us feel. They and I evidently see these things in very different ways. I agree that the truth of a statement doesn’t depend on whose name is at the end of it. Neither, in essence, does its ability to inspire.* However, the attribution that’s attached to a quote does matter. It is a statement of fact: such-and-such a person said this. When a quote we share is misattributed or distorted, we’re passing on information that’s false.
To unknowingly pass on a quote that’s misattributed or inaccurate is one thing. We’re all fallible. But not to care about doing this is another matter. Surely it should be uncontroversial that it’s better to share truth rather than falsehood? Also, I value fairness: I’d like to see us credit the true authors of quotes, rather than misattribute their work and deny them their due as creators.
Just as most of us have inadvertently passed on to our online friends misattributed or distorted quotes, many of us have unwittingly passed on fake news stories. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see these two phenomena as connected.
There are people who invent stories for reasons of political partisanship, or to make money by driving traffic to their websites, or simply for the enjoyment they get from manipulating others. These articles are often designed to provoke us emotionally, which has the side-effect of making us less rational and more uncritical. Before we know it, we’ve been conned into sharing a false narrative that “shows” how stupid, intolerant, or evil our political opponents are. Our minds become weaponized by the hateful, the greedy, and the mischievous.
When our minds are hijacked in this way, we inadvertently allow ourselves to be used as tools to damage something I think we all, deep down, love. I believe that beneath our outrage is a desire to relate to each other with mutual respect, to find ways to disagree civilly, and to recognize our common humanity. But our sharing of untruth pushes us into separate social bubbles, as people who have different values from us “unfriend” us, or as we do the same to them.
These days I find myself checking just about any quote before I pass it on, especially where the content is political. For example, the majority of quotes I’ve seen on social media that purport to be from the Founding Fathers of the United States—whether being put forward to support a liberal or conservative agenda—are either invented or taken out of context. I also see many images of contemporary political figures to which have been added manufactured quotations or distorted narratives that show them in a bad light.
So I encourage the following practice: pause before you share. I encourage us all to take a moment before passing on a quote or a news story in order to do a little research. Someone (and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Buddha) said that “Google before you share” is the new “think before you speak.”
Taking a moment to fact-check stories and quotes is good for us on a spiritual level. One of the distinctive features of the Buddha’s teaching is an emphasis on being mindful of our feelings, and of learning not to react to them with attachment or aversion. Provocative “news” stories are designed to inflame our emotions and make us act without thinking. Do we really want to be manipulated in this way, or would we rather act in a way that’s mindful and self-possessed?
Training yourself to be mindful of your feelings teaches you how to avoid being exploited. Taking a sacred pause when your emotional buttons have been pressed is a way of reclaiming your own mind and your autonomy as a human being. This also applies to sharing what inspires us; as the desire to share a quote that moves us builds, we can pause and let our desire for truthfulness catch up with our enthusiasm.
Checking our sources helps check our emotions. When we research with the genuine intention to seek the truth, we engage our neo-cortex. This is the part of the brain where higher reasoning takes place and where self-control originates. It’s the most distinctively human part of our brains, and so by training ourselves to respond to the world with thoughtfulness, curiosity, and a little skepticism, rather than reacting emotionally, we literally become more human.
Fact-checking gives us an opportunity to practice our critical thinking skills. We can learn which sources are likely to be trustworthy and not believe the first thing we see online (“It must be true; I saw it on the internet!”) and avoid practicing confirmation bias by looking only for information that reinforces what we want to believe. (Pro tip: quotes sites exist to make money, and fake quotes attract as many eyeballs and advertising dollars as genuine ones do.) We can learn that just because something is repeated by many people, it’s not necessarily true. In the case of fake news, we can learn to look for signs that someone is trying to manipulate us.
In his quest to discover a true perspective on life, the Buddha abandoned all that was dear to him and spent years scrutinizing his experience to see what it could teach him about the nature of Reality. Eventually he attained awakening, and saw things as they really are. If we’re inspired by his words, then perhaps we’ll choose to be inspired by his life too, and likewise work to seek, love, and protect the truth.
Taking responsibility for what we share is an opportunity to show care and respect for the culture around us and all beings affected by it. Hopefully by doing these things we can make the world a better place.
When we consider the vast complexity of the societies in which we live, we may think that our individual actions can have little effect. But we should never underestimate our power to create change. “It takes just one snowball to start an avalanche,” as the Buddha never said.
* However, as Ethel Fischbaum noted, “One reason so many quotations are misattributed is that words are taken more seriously when attached to the name of a famous person.”