The Buddha is one of the world’s most misquoted people. Sayings that claim to be by him, but aren’t, abound in Facebook memes, quote sites, blog articles, and even in published books. I call them Fake Buddha Quotes—a quick and dirty term that’s intended to be concise, playful, and just a little provocative.
How did I get started on this quest? A cartoon by Randall Munroe shows a figure sitting hunched in front of a computer screen. A voice off-panel asks, “Are you coming to bed?” The computer user replies, “I can’t. This is important. Someone on the internet is wrong.” Munroe and I have never met, but he has somehow gazed into the depths of my very soul.
Almost a decade ago, perplexed, bemused, and sometimes alarmed by the fact that the majority of “Buddha quotes” I saw on social media were things the Buddha never said, I began documenting the Fake Buddha Quote phenomenon. I cataloged them on a blog, identified their origins when I could, and offered some genuine scriptural quotations to show what the Buddha (as best we know) really taught. Fake quotes became teachable moments.
My suspicions about these spurious quotes may be aroused by a number of things. One common giveaway is the style, which may be too flowery, poetic, or literary. Another is the vocabulary, which is often much too contemporary to be the words of someone who lived some 2,500 years ago.
If someone told you that “Technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal,” was a quote from William Shakespeare, I hope you’d be suspicious. You’d probably think that the vocabulary was too modern, and assume that a sentence like that would be more at home in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. (In fact it’s something Albert Einstein wrote in 1917.) I’m pretty sure that no one has ever tried to pass off this particular quotation as being from Shakespeare, but I’ve seen plenty of “Buddha quotes” that are just as anachronistic.
The earliest scriptures are recorded in languages like Pali and Sanskrit, which have very different grammatical rules from English. This can give even the best translations a stilted and clunky feel. Knowing that one fact, here’s a little test for you. Which of the following quotes about virtue do you think is more likely to come from India 2,500 years ago?
1. “The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups. A good principle was never found solitary in any breast.”
2. “For a person endowed with virtue, consummate in virtue, there is no need for an act of will, ‘May freedom from remorse arise in me.’ It is in the nature of things that freedom from remorse arises in a person endowed with virtue, consummate in virtue.”
If you picked the second, you’re well on the way to becoming a fully licensed Fake Buddha Quote–buster. Congratulations!
If the first quote sounds like something from the nineteenth century, that’s because it is. Although it’s often attributed to the Buddha, it’s actually from an 1807 book by Jane Porter, a Scottish novelist, playwright, and literary figure. The reference to the Muses—Ancient Greek goddesses the Buddha would have had no familiarity with—is a dead giveaway.
The second quote is from a Buddhist discourse called the Cetana Sutta. Notice that “freedom from remorse” and “a person endowed with virtue, consummate in virtue” each appear twice in two short sentences. This is typical in a literature that was originally oral, where repetition helps with memorization. There’s also some awkwardness about the abrupt way the embedded quote is dropped in, which happens because Pali treats direct speech very differently from English.
And how about these two quotes on the topic of attachment? Which do you think is a genuine quote from the Buddha?
1. “Don’t be attached to my philosophy and doctrine. Attachment to any religion is simply another form of mental illness.”
2. “From attachment springs grief, from attachment springs fear. For one who is wholly free from attachment there is no grief, whence then fear?”
This one might be trickier, but if you thought the first quote was suspect because “mental illness” is a modern term, you’d be correct.* Some of us might wish that the first one was something the Buddha had said, and it’s often been taken as such, but it’s actually by a twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist teacher. The genuine passage is unfortunately less quotable.
A subtler giveaway is when quotes clash with what the Buddha taught, although to know that you have to have some familiarity with the Buddhist scriptures. For example, the quote, “Doubt everything. Find your own light,” might sound genuine unless you were aware that the Buddha didn’t talk about doubt in a positive sense, but only as a state of confusion.
Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell whether or not a quote is legitimate. I’ve been convinced a particular saying is genuine only to discover that it’s fake, and vice versa. Some fake quotes even fool Buddhist scholars, making their way into academic books and papers. This is understandable. When you’ve seen something quoted frequently by people you trust, you naturally assume it must be genuine.
So how do Fake Buddha Quotes arise?
First, there’s the phenomenon of “quotation promotion”: a tendency for quotes to be reassigned from relatively less well-known to more famous authors. Presumably this is because to many people a quote written by, say, Ethel Fischbaum (whom I just invented) sounds less authoritative than one attributed to Albert Einstein or Winston Churchill. You don’t want to pass on an inspiring quote to your Facebook friends only to have half of them respond with “Who the heck’s Ethel Fischbaum?” On the other hand those same friends might think well of you seeing you quote, and thereby associate yourself with, some literary or historical giant.
The “mental illness” quote is an example of another phenomenon we could call a “slip of the ear.” This happens when a teacher paraphrases the Buddha’s teaching while giving a talk (“The Buddha said that…”) and then a transcriber or editor mistakes the paraphrase as an actual quote.
Then there are what I call “lost in translation” quotes. Sometimes, due to lack of skill or because the translator wants to insert his or her own beliefs—creating a “new, improved” version of the Buddha’s teaching—translators distort the meaning of the original. Take, for example, the following pair of quotes:
1. “Clearly understanding one’s own welfare, let one be intent upon the good.”
2. “Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”
Would you believe these are both translations of the same verse? The first quote is a literal rendition, while the other seems to be composed of one percent actual translation and ninety-nine percent poetic inspiration. Unfortunately, the fake version from this example is quoted far more often than the legitimate one. After all, while the more literal translation doesn’t exactly sizzle, the language of discovering your work and of giving yourself to it with all your heart sounds rather appealing.
Lastly, I’m convinced that sometimes people just make up a spiritual-sounding quote and stick “The Buddha” on the end. As we all know, there are plenty of trolls on the internet.
When I use the provocative term “fake,” I’m saying nothing more than that a quote is misattributed—that we can’t legitimately claim it was said by the Buddha. Whether it’s in line with the Buddha’s teachings, inspiring, or personally meaningful to you are other matters entirely. So bear in mind that if I debunk the origins of a quote that you like, I’m not necessarily saying that it’s not useful or inspiring. (There are some Fake Buddha Quotes that I really wish the Buddha had said.)
The extent to which these spurious quotations have displaced the genuine article is striking. There are many blog posts along the lines of “Buddha Quotes That Will Change Your Life” that are composed almost entirely of things that the Buddha never said. In this age of self-publishing, you can even buy entire books composed mainly of fake quotes. It seems that many people are drawn more strongly to fake quotations than to legitimate ones—presumably because the fakes sound more literary and poetic.
In fact, the Buddha foresaw that his followers would be tempted to ignore his own words:
They will listen when discourses that are literary works—the works of poets, elegant in sound, elegant in rhetoric, the work of outsiders, words of disciples—are recited. They will lend ear and set their hearts on knowing them.
For the purposes of this book I’ve chosen fifty quotes from the hundreds I’ve collected over the years. You’ll find all of them circulating on social media, in blog posts, or published in books. Many of them are even available on mugs, T-shirts, and fridge magnets.
As we examine these quotes, I’ll point out what made me suspect their authenticity, identify where I can who the true authors were, and offer examples of legitimate quotes from the Buddhist scriptures. We’ll examine these quotes in alphabetical order, giving us an A to Z of things the Buddha never said.
But before we begin, let me confess to fallibility. I’ve endeavored to be accurate in this book, but if I’ve slipped up, I beg your forgiveness. As Voltaire said, “We are all formed of frailty and error; let us reciprocally pardon each other’s folly.” Or as no one ever said, until now, “To err is human, to forgive is Buddha-ful.”
* The Buddha did contrast being “afflicted in body” (i.e physically sick) with being “afflicted in mind,” but he didn’t use the latter term in the same way we’d use the term “mentally ill.”