Fake Buddha Quotes

"In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves."
-- Siddhartha Buddha

"In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves."
-- Abraham J Hershel

"In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves."
-- Thomas Carlyle

On my computer desktop I have a “Buddha Quote of the Day” applet. The quote for today was: "In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.” I rather liked this quote as it reminded me of the recent after dinner discussion held at my parents’ house this last Thanksgiving. Mom is uncomfortable with gaps in conversation and so into the silence she threw this little question, “So what does everyone think about Obama?”

I decided to look up the citation for this quote, by typing the the quote into Google. Google found the quote quite easily but the first three links attributed the it to three different sources. If Buddha did say this I suppose its somewhere in the Pali Cannon, but I have yet to find a good on line search-able index to the Cannon, so I don’t know if it’s in there or not.

This got me thinking about all the different quotes I see attributed to Lord Buddha. I found one web site that included, “Top five Buddha quotes”, all without citation. In fact among the dozens of Buddha quotation sites I looked at (out of the tens of thousands that are out there) only one included citations.

Another quote (supposedly in a terma?) that gets bandied about goes something like,

“When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the dharma will spread to the land of the red man.”

This is often taken (by Americans) as a prophecy regarding the Chinese take over of Tibet and the subsequent transmission of Buddhist teaching to the West, specifically the U.S. Isn’t it nice to know that Buddha or Guru Rinpoche or who ever made a prophesy specifically about us here in North America?

Go ahead, type the quote into Google and see what you get, I’ll wait… Again, a lot of people repeating this alleged quote but no attribution.

This quote has exerted such a powerful grip on the psyche of Westerners with our romanticized view of Tibet, that it has even generated another “prophesy”. This one is attributed to another highly romanticized group, the Hopi:

"When the iron bird flies, the red-robed people of the East who have lost their land will appear, and the two brothers from across the great ocean will be reunited."

Tonto couldn’t have said it better.

A spin off from this pseudo-prophesy is the often repeated, and oh-so-spooky “fact” that if one were to draw a line from Lhasa through the center of the Earth one would find one’s self on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Anyone with a globe can see this is not true, but since the majority of Americans couldn’t point to Tibet (or Arizona) on a globe it’s not surprising that this bit of hum-buggery has gained currency.

As much as I disagree with Dad on Obama, I do have to say “thanks” for the globe that I got for Christmas back when I was 12. Thanks Dad for laying the foundation for being able to spot Dharma silliness.