Thank you Maurice Rickard, who also suspected that <a href=”http://world.std.com/~emg/2000_07_01_blog_archive.html # “>the Dalai Lama’s message (below) was a hoax, and pointed me to the scoop at the Urban Legends Reference Pages:

Much as we can’t help but grin at the thought of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin

Gyatso, head of state and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, pecking away at a computer keyboard

as he sends a chain glurge advising people to “approach love and cooking with reckless abandon”

winging its way around the Internet, we have to admit that this list has nothing to do with the Dalai

Lama.

Neither this chain message nor its “Instructions for Life” originated with His Holiness. The “Instructions

for Life” are a truncated version of a much longer list that worked its way around the Internet in 1999 in

conjunction with an ASCII art representation of a “Nepalese Good Luck Tantra Totem.” (The list was also

sometimes identified as being a “modern Japanese good luck tantra.”)

…The longer list is itself yet another truncation of a larger work, which in this case is Life’s Little Instruction

Book, by Jackson Brown and H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Perhaps the Dalai Lama isn’t concerned with

royalties (in a copyright sense, at least), but we suspect Messrs. Brown are, so finding something other

than a copyright violation to pass around with the goal of improving people’s lives would probably be in

order.