If you do not find the solution where you stand where else shall you find it? #Buddha

— Steven L Hairfield (@AnAmericanMonk) June 17, 2012

I came across this one on Twitter, and it immediately struck me as suspect. The question of what this “solution” is is rather troubling. The Buddha didn’t use language like that. And I don’t recall him using language like “where you stand,” either. There’s something incongruous about that language that had my FBQ-senses tingling.

The Twitter user, @AnAmericanMonk is rather prone to posting Fake Buddha Quotes, incidentally, and most of the quotes he publishes are misattributed. Which leads me to wonder whether some people have an affinity for Fake Buddha Quotes. I’ve noticed that many people who post Buddha quotes are like @AnAmericanMonk, with the majority of their quotes turning out to be fake. This could be partly because much of what the Buddha says isn’t in sound-bites, and it often isn’t in a literary style that we find polished. This may be due to the oral tradition rather than the Buddha’s own choice of words… Couple that with a lack of familiarity with the Buddhist scriptures, and I can see how when these polished nuggets come along with a #Buddha hashtag attached, they catch the eye.

If you do not find truth where you stand where else will you find it. From ‘The Twelve Sacred Principles of Karma’ #ICP

— Steven L Hairfield (@AnAmericanMonk) March 19, 2012

Anyway, my being suspicious of a quote doesn’t mean that it is actually fake. I plunged into researching and found that there weren’t many instances of this quote, and most of them seemed to lead back to @AnAmericanMonk. But when I tried searching for fragments of the quote, I turned up variants. Our old friend @AnAmericanMonk in fact has also posted the following version: “If you do not find truth where you stand where else will you find it?”

The quote with “truth” in it now sounds much more genuine, although the “where you stand” didn’t ring true.

Google Books brought up a book containing a variant of that variant: “If you can’t find the truth right where you are, where else do you think you will find it?” This time it was attributed to Eihei Dogen, which sounded more plausible. The book in which this quote was offered was Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, edited by Larry Chang, and Chang kindly provided a citation: “The Practice of Meditation” in The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose, Stephen Mitchell, ed., 1991.

From here is was just another quick search on Google Books, and I had a source. The quote is right there on page 101.

I’m now confident that @AnAmericanMonk quote, “If you do not find the solution where you stand where else shall you find it?” is a mangling of Dogen (“truth” having been turned into “the solution”), misattributed to the Buddha. And so I’m therefore equally confident in saying that this is a Fake Buddha Quote.