RT @conduru: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” ~ Buddha.
— Emily Breder (@ohiobuddhist) December 19, 2009
The quote in question comes from “he Teaching of Buddha: The Buddhist bible : A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from the Japanese, published in 1934 by The Federation of All Young Buddhist Associations of Japan.
It’s in a section titled “Sacred Aphorisms,” many of which are recognizable as quotes from the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada quotes are unnumbered, which makes them tricky to identify at times, but this seems to be a rendition of verse 348:
Munca pure munca pacchato
majjhe munca bhavassa paragu
sabbattha vimuttamanaso
na punam jatijaram upehisi.
My literal translation of this would be:
Let go of the past, let go of the future.
Let go of the present. Having gone beyond becoming,
with mind completely freed,
you will never again come to birth and aging.
Buddharakkhita’s translation is:
Let go of the past, let go of the future,
let go of the present, and cross over to the farther shore of existence.
With mind wholly liberated,
you shall come no more to birth and death.
This is very different from “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” The first two clauses (“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future”) , although poetic, are accurate, but the third (“concentrate the mind on the present moment”) is a significant distortion of what the Dhammapada literally says. I’m not arguing there’s anything wrong with concentrating the mind on the present moment — far from it. But the essential message, that none of our experience is to be clung to, gets lost.
It’s no doubt surprising to many people, since the terminology is a standard part of modern discussion about Buddhism, but the Buddha didn’t often talk in terms of “the present moment” or “concentrating on the present moment.” The closest I know to the quote above (although see my “Postscript” below) is a single reference in the Bhaddekaratta Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya, which says:
“You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.”
There is also however a passage where a disciple of the Buddha, Samiddhi, says the following:
“I, friend, do not reject the present moment to pursue what time will bring. I reject what time will bring to pursue the present moment.”
Or in Thanissaro’s translation, this same saying is:
“My friend, I’m not dropping what’s visible here-and-now in pursuit of what’s subject to time. I’m dropping what’s subject to time in pursuit of what’s visible here-and-now.”
Thus, the message of the suspect quote is not something to quibble with. It’s always a judgment call when it comes to translations that take liberties with the text. Sometimes I’m happy to go with a translator’s creative take on the original. But in this case I regard this quote as different enough from the original that it’s effectively a Fake Buddha Quote.
Postscript
However! Niklas (see comment below) pointed me to the Arañña Sutta of the Samyutta Nikaya, which includes the following verse:
They do not mourn for the past,
They do not yearn for the future,
They live on the present;
Therefore they are of good complexion.
(My translation)
The Pali is:
Atītaṃ nānusocanti nappajappanti’nāgataṃ,
Paccuppannena yāpenti tena vaṇṇo pasīdati.
This is a reply to a question put by a deva to the Buddha, in which he is asked why the forest dwellers, living on one meal a day, have such good complexions.
The reply is something of a pun, since “yāpeti” means “to go” or “to dwell” (a synonym of viharati) but it can also mean to “live on” food. So the deva who asks the question talks about the monks eating one meal a day, and the Buddha responds by talking about how the monks “live on” the present moment. As far as I’m aware this isn’t a common usage, and the pun doesn’t really work well in English.
The suspect quote in question (“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment”), while close in meaning to the Arañña Sutta, isn’t a translation of it. But this is an interesting moment in the excavation of Fake Buddha Quotes — where we find a quote from one sutta that is not faithful to the original but which accidentally ends up being close to another sutta.
That’s interesting to hear – I sat with a Zen group for a year and the idea of ‘being in the present moment’ seemed so integral to the whole endeavour that I assumed that The Buddha must have spoken about it a lot!
I’m quite sure the Buddha taught about being in the present moment, even if he isn’t recorded as using those words, and quite possibly never did use them.
Great to see this site!
Taken literally, of course, it is impossible to not live in the present moment because it always already is the present moment. You don’t have to try to live in this moment. Even when you think about the future, those thoughts are happening right now. Likewise with thoughts of the past – when you think of the past, you have no choice, those thoughts necessarily occur in the present moment. Buddha taught mindfulness.(Amoung other things.) Let’s not confuse the teaching of ‘living in the now’ with the teaching of being mindful.
Nice post! Tallis
Well, yes, in an obvious sense we can’t be anywhen but the present moment. But to talk about being in the present moment isn’t usually taken to mean that we can’t think about the past or future, it’s talking about, as you say, being mindful of our experience whether we’re attending to thoughts of the past or future, or to what’s happening right now. Most of the time when people are thinking about the past or future they’re not in fact mindful, and so they’re not reflexively aware of their thinking or the effect it’s having on them. It’s just a figure of speech, and it can be misinterpreted.
Here’s more or less a great fake Buddha quote.
In the Coen Brother’s movie “Ladykillers”, a gang who committed a heist was caught by an old woman is pondering what to do with her since she threatens that she will call the police if they don’t return the money and attend church with her. Struggling with the the possibility of killing her, the leader of the gang, the professor turns to the tunneler who was apparently one of the Vietcong says “General, you are a Buddhist. Is there not a middle way?”
He replied “Must float down the river of life like a leaf… and kill old lady.”
Hi Bud,
Your mention of ‘now’/time harkens to an UN-fake quote by the Buddha….
“THis you must come to know oh Bahiya, you are neither in the future, nor in the past, nor betwixt the two….”
(something to that effect)
I haven’t been able to find the exact reference, it’s either in B.Bodhi’s trans of the SN , pp1175, or in the MN 35:95….
At the end of the day, we are who we are and our thoughts take us to the past and to the future in terms of,perhaps, regretting our behavior and aspiring to be better individuals
Just found your blog – could give you a big heap of fake Buddha quotes from postcards!
Re the present moment, nearest I can think of is saying almost the opposite, or at least not privileging the present moment. Dhammapada v 348:
“Let go of the present, let go of the future, let go of the present and cross over to the farther shore.”
I agree with the person who said that while not being specifically mentioned in the suttas, that the present moment is implicit already in the central teaching on mindfulness (sati) – which IS mentioned, maybe hundreds of times throughout the Buddha’s teachings. Mindfulness means ‘recollection’, ie knowing, being aware. If someone is off in daydream land (as I all too often can be sometimes), they are not being mindful, and thus not in the present. As soon as someone then KNOWS that there is dreaming going on, in that instant mindfulness is there again (ie: knowing where the mind is). If you know where your mind is, what it is up to, you are ‘in the present’.
Yes, focusing on the present moment is implicit in the traditional teachings, but it’s rarely explicitly stated that this is what we should do. I did find one Pali canon quote that’s close enough to what’s above to make me say that my Twitter quote isn’t so much fake as heavily paraphrased. So I think now I was being rather hasty in declaring this to be a Fake Buddha Quote. The original is in the Bhaddekaratta Sutta:
Just because I’m a PITA, I have to mention that by the time we perceive the present moment, it is the past.
That’s absolutely true, although there is a perceptual present moment, even if what’s being perceived happened a fraction of a second ago, or even millions of years ago, if it’s something like seeing the light from a star.
What about Arañña Sutta, SN 1.10:
Living in the wilderness, staying peaceful, remaining chaste, eating just one meal a day: why are their faces so bright & serene?
[The Buddha:]
They don’t sorrow over the past, don’t long for the future. They survive on the present. That’s why their faces are bright & serene. From longing for the future, from sorrowing over the past, fools wither away like a green reed cut down.
Thanks. That’s interesting. I’ll check it out.
Thanks, Niklas. I updated the post.