This Fake Buddha Quote was forwarded to me today, and it’s one I’d never seen before:
“The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.”
This one’s quite straightforward: it’s from the Rg Veda (10:71) , which of course is a pre-Buddhist text that nowadays we’d say was Hindu, although the people of the Rg Veda would not have recognized that word.
This is, of course, found in many of the quotes sites that are found on the internet, and which as far as I can see take little if any care to attribute their quotations correctly. I’d imagine their primary motivation is to get traffic and earn money, and that fact-checking would no doubt inhibit those activities.
The earliest dated misattribution I’ve found on the web is dated Jan 30, 1992, where it’s in the company of many other Fake Buddha Quotes.
It’s also found in at least five books (in one it’s paired, rather ironically, with “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it”) although we can expect to see many more in the future, as the cycle of websites quoting books quoting websites kicks in. Ain’t the internet a wonderful thing — making it easier for misinformation to circulate.