3 private links
HUMAN NATURE, BUDDHA NATURE
On Spiritual Bypassing, Relationship, and the Dharma
An interview with John Welwood by Tina Fossella
“You Deserve Your Love and Affection”
“Nope, I didn’t say that” —The Buddha
By Bodhipaksa
Sometimes it’s hard to say how you know. You come across a quote attributed to the Buddha on Facebook or Twitter, or on a blog—sometimes even in a magazine or a book—and something just doesn’t feel right. The wording may be too modern, the sentence structure a tad too polished, the sentiment, perhaps, too syrupy. But for some reason, deep in the computational matrix of the brain, pattern recognition algorithms are triggered, an alert fires off, and you wonder, “Hmmm, did the Buddha really say this?”
Several years ago, noticing more and more of these spurious quotations swirling in the information vortex that is the Internet, I began to research and document them on my personal blog. People sent me quotes they found suspicious, and my collection grew. Eventually I started a dedicated Fake Buddha Quotes blog (and I define a Fake Buddha Quote simply as one that can’t be established as belonging to a canonical text). I find researching these quotes fun, and many people love the blog, although others seem to regard the activity of winnowing out misattributed quotations as akin to stealing candy from babies.
Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, and a quote I was suspicious of turns out to be canonical. And sometimes, I confess, my “spidey sense” fails me, and something that struck me as genuine turns out not to be. But nine times out of ten I can spot a fake.
A reader of my blog sent me this quote, which he thought was “strange”:
You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
I agreed that something was “off” about this quotation. In the Buddha’s teachings, or those ascribed to him in the Pali canon, that one has lovingkindness for oneself seems to be a given, and the emphasis is on extending our concern to others. So if you’re familiar with the Pali texts, this quotation may stand out as an oddity, however appealing it may be.
The first signs of this quote that I found in print were in two books that were published in early 2001: John Amodeo’s The Authentic Heart, subtitled An Eightfold Path to Midlife Love, and Laura Doyle’s The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man.
I’m getting a little off topic here, but I learned that The Surrendered Wife “is a step-by-step guide that teaches women how to give up unnecessary control and responsibility; resist the temptation to criticize, belittle, or dismiss their husbands; and to trust their husbands in every aspect of marriage—from sexual to financial.” (I’d buy my wife a copy, but she’d probably hit me with it.)
Given that these books were published more or less simultaneously, it seemed reasonable to assume that there was a precursor. With a little digging around I found that Sharon Salzberg used our suspect quote in her 1995 Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, and even earlier in a magazine called Woman of Power (no “surrendered wives” here), published in 1989.
The original would seem to be in the Udana of the Pali canon, where we read, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation:
Searching in all directions
With your awareness,
you find no one dearer
than yourself.
In the same way, others
are thickly dear to themselves.
So you shouldn’t hurt others
if you love yourself.
Salzberg may have gotten her translation of the quote from one of her teachers, Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadaw, whose 1983 booklet Brahmavihara Dhamma translates the beginning of the Udana quote with the verb “deserves”: “A person who deserves more love and affection than one’s own self, in any place or anywhere, cannot be found. Similarly, other people also, with reference to their own respective Self, love (himself) the most. Inasmuch as every being loves his own Self the most, one who loves his own Self, nay, who cares most of his own welfare or for his own good, will not cause another person to suffer . . .”
In the original Udana quote, as well as in Mahasi Sayadaw’s translation and exegesis of it, the purpose is to emphasize that we should extend the lovingkindness we have for ourselves toward others, recognizing that they too hold themselves dear. The import of the version Salzberg used has been reversed, to suggest that you should love yourself just as you love others. We of course should have lovingkindness toward ourselves, so there’s no argument with the message—it just so happens that it doesn’t accurately reflect what the scriptures say.
But does this all matter? Isn’t a quote valid no matter who the author was? If the spirit of a saying is Buddhist, does the attribution matter? And wasn’t the Buddha himself so spiritually advanced that he wouldn’t have been upset about having words put in his mouth?
In some ways it doesn’t matter. The spiritual usefulness of a quotation indeed is not affected by its origins, although the weight people give the words being quoted does vary depending on whom it’s attributed to. We’re less inclined to pass on a quote if it’s anonymous or attributed to someone we’ve never heard of. And perhaps we like the cachet that comes from passing on quotes attributed to the Buddha, or Plato, or Nelson Mandela. (Is that a form of attachment? I think it is.) But the foundation of right speech in Buddhism is speaking truthfully—and it’s not truthful to say that a quote, however valid, is from the Buddha when there’s no evidence that it is.
There weren’t many things that seemed to rile the Buddha, but being misquoted was one of them (noisy monks being another). According to the Pali canon, the Buddha described one who “explains what was not said or spoken by the Tathagata as said or spoken by the Tathagata” as a “slanderer.” Strong words. And in the Maha-parinibbana Sutta the Buddha encouraged his disciples to compare Buddha quotes with the scriptures and reject them if they were “neither traceable in the Discourses nor verifiable by the Discipline” (Digha Nikaya 16.4.8).
You can quote him on that.
McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga:Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom
Dr. Miles Neale
Over the last several decades, the popularity of yoga has grown tremendously in the West. Anemerging need tomanage the stress and dissatisfaction of busy lives by looking inward for peace and stillness has motivated many to participate in the yoga revolution, whichhas become a multibillion-dollar industryin America. People of all ages are turning to yoga to relax, recover from health problems, ease the difficulties of pregnancy, improve sexual vitality andintimacy, sharpen mental focus and generally look and feel better. More recently, there has been a similar upsurge of interest in meditation, particularly in a Buddhist form of practice called mindfulness. On the heels of theyoga boom, the mindfulness fad seems to mirror the motivating factors that initially drove people toward yoga: namely enhanced health and happiness. While meditation offers less immediate gratification (no endorphin rush or image-enhancing results) than its physical counterpart, it also leads to inner peace. During the mid-1990s, rising interest in mindfulness meditation culminated in an explosion of scientific investigation by healthcare professionals and researchers seeking to determine the clinical effects and health benefits of this ancient practice. Nothing has been the same since.Focus on meditation has reached critical mass. A large body of reliable evidence nowsupports claimsand demonstrates the mechanisms that makemindfulness effective. Most major hospitalsrun some sort of outpatient meditation program,dharma and spiritual centers are attracting more people than ever,and as many as one in four psychotherapists incorporate mindfulness into clinical work with patients. As greater numbers of people engage in yoga or meditation, their lives are transformed for the better. But is something being lost in translation?Are these practices, brought to the West from India and other parts of Asia in the early nineteenth century, being diluted? In our attempt to secularize, make culturally accessible and mainstream these ancient spiritual practices, we may bethrowing the baby out with the bath water. It behooves us to consider what, if anything, has been sacrificed in the effort to satisfy our voracious appetite for Asian contemplative techniques. Americansare notorious for extrapolating what theyidealize,plucking the desirable from foreign cultures and simply disregarding the rest. We are also prone to seeking quick fixes and inciting temporary trends, lacking the patience and long-term commitment needed for lasting change. Arethe yoga boom and mindfulness fad yet othersinstances of these Amerocentric inclinations? Itwould be an enormous loss for us to water down or, worse, jettison the essential transformative ingredients that constitute the Indic liberation traditions, turning them into colorfully packaged bite-size morsels for our mass consumption. Is this the dawning of the age of McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga?What exactly is being lost as yoga and meditation wendtheir way into America’s diet? And what, if anything, can we do about it? I propose that we are losing therich and sophisticated psychological context underpinning the practices of yoga and mindfulness, and that by reuniting them with their original matrixes we can turn the yoga boom and mindfulness fad into a spiritual revolution unlike any we have seen in our young country.