I have never seen anything like this;
but I imagine, that’s what the real world would look like, if it were real.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to achieve the greatest effects with the smallest of means.
All one needs is one sun, trees, flowers, and love.

However, if the latter is missing from the heart of the viewer, then the whole will be a poor sight,
and the sun will only be so many miles in diameter, the trees just good for heating, the flowers will be classified by their stamens,
and the water will be wet.

Now you have something to complain.

The little wabbit is sad and lonely.
Now it is all alone in the world.

When his eleven brothers and sisters were still alive—and his two hundred and thirty-five cousins—they were one big family. They ate four-leaf clovers and drank dew-drops from hyacinth petals. Life was wonderful, then; especially the night when Papa came hopping back from Mexico with a whole suitcase of the finest grass from South of the Rio Grande. Ah, how they danced in the moonlight…

The next morning is when it happened. Farmer Mc Gregor says it was an agricultural accident. The little wabbits family perished, and the meadow is no more. The little wabbit is lonely and sad. All the grass is gone.

The little wabbit has taken to stealing cabbages from Mc Gregor. You have to eat something!
Shop-and-Stop has received complaints about a lonely wabbit knocking old ladies over in the parking lot and running away with the vegetables! Oh my!

The little lonely wabbit is thinking of buying a gun and getting into the used hub-cap business.

I am afraid, this is not going to end well…

When cranes sing, they crane their necks. That’s why they are called cranes.
But why are they singing?
To protect their territory.

Birds have existed for over a hundred million years. They knew how to fly when the first mammals still lived like rats, because they looked like rats.
And by singing—not by warfare—hey have successfully protected themselves..
It has worked for them, for a hundred million years!

The defense industry rejects the idea as ridiculous.

And now a painting in the Lingnang style.
The brush strokes are strong and firm, yet the effect is gentle and easy.
I am indebted to Master Ch’ao.
I wonder of he’s still alive.

The myth of progress—and with it History—has finally collapsed.
The avant-garde, which prided itself of being ahead of its time, suddenly finds itself irrelevant.
Now the world is waiting for the resurrection of the soul.

While you are waiting for a catharsis, you can buy this painting which is utterly devoid of progress—or history— for the special price of $ 199.99 plus shipping and handling, (whatever that is).
Residents of Massachusetts must pay a 6.5% sales tax; all others will be dealt with by the Revolutionary Council.

Sooner or later my students will suspect that they are holding the short end of the stick. They accuse me of having painted for thousands of years, while they have been duped into taking up the mysterious oriental brush which might explode any minute!
To scatter these accusations and irrational fears I dropped my brush, dipped my fingers into the ink and painted this beautiful scene:

On a hot summer day a water buffalo is enjoying a dip in the pond, close to the shore, under the branches of a willow. The sun is shining, and a light breeze is blowing.
On another level, the peaceful bull symbolizes the mind which has been trained and brought under control. The controlled mind does what it is supposed to do automatically. Force is no longer necessary. The self is at peace.

To be fair, I have to mention that finger painting is not the entertainment of five year olds, but the last word in efficiency.
Only Picasso could top it; he claimed to be painting with his balls…

In my studio there are two piles of paintings, alltogether four thousand of them. Actually, there could be seven thousand; I can't count them. Most of them are worthless and should be burned. Occasionally one finds something like this.
Perfect.

Fujisan is Japan's most sacred mountain.
In America, mountains are decidedly not sacred. You can blow their tops away to save a few bucks.
Here, instead, the horse is sacred. No one in California or Illinois is allowed to eat the sacred animal; and if you want to kill a horse, you have to put it in a bus to Guadalahara.

The national dress of the natives of El Norte are pants with "stove-pipe" leggings. Originally designed for riding horses, these curious garments are rather uncomfortable; they cut off the circulation which reduces sperm-production in the American male.
The last fact—the insufficient sperm count—produces feeble, imbecilic offspring, and explains the gradual stupefication of the citizenry.

Buddha started his career as a Buddha by meditating with a band of yogis. Not knowing anything about the jungle he sat down on a patch of poison ivy—and Buddhism was born!
Understandably, his first statement was: "Life is suffering". Then he pronounced The Four Noble Truths:

1. Leaves of three—let them be!
2. Treat blisters with calamine lotion.
3 .Wear loose clothing
4. Don't scratch yourself!!!

If you haven't heard this before, you've been reading poor translations. The literature is full of it! Take, for instance The Sermon Of The Flower:

One day, instead of sermonizing, the Buddha held up a red flower.
No one knew what to make of this.
Then his favorite disciple Mahakasyapa smiled knowingly.
End of sermon.

Well, folks, this should read "red leaves" instead of "red flower". You realize that he was holding up a twig of poison ivy. (And Mahakasyapa, by that time, had also been infected.)

There is a wealth of evidence that the Enlightened One never got rid of the affliction until his last day on earth.

Buddha prepares to enter Mahaparinirvana.
"Surrounded by weeping disciples , he lays down on his right side…"

Here the word "disciples" is a mistranslation of "blisters".
Don't dying people lie on their back? Well, his back was still covered with weeping blisters.


Now that all doubts have been removed, set out on the spiritual path!


…but stick to the Middle Path.

If this is true, then you have to admit that the world is perfect.
If this cannot be true, then you might as well laugh.

Nothing much happened in the Kingdom of the Mice until 1816.
That year E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote "The Nutckacker and the Mouseking"— in which the mouseking appears as an evil character. Of course, His Majesty took exception to this unflattering portrayal if Himself, but Hoffmann was busy surviving the War of the Fourth Coalition, the War of the Sixth Coalition, and the Battle of Dresden. In exasperation the mice ate most the manuscript of Hoffmann's greatest opera "The Great and Unneccessary War of the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Coalition" The composer published the leftovers as "A Short Waltz based on a Cro-Magnon Skinning Chant".

Tchaikovsky's could have given the Mouseking a fair shake. Instead he has the mouseking dance around in a tutu.
I'm not going to pay any money to see that.

Here is a picture of our ancestors, the fish.

My branch of the family participated in Evolution, developed stumpy fins and crawled onto the land. Was that a wise move? Right away we wound up in the trees, go figure!
Then we invented walking, a controlled forward-falling, a silly way of propelling ourselves—and it hurts the feet! That's why we now have automobiles.

I suggest, we line up all the automobiles and drive them back into the ocean, where they belong…

This is how we used to paint in the Sung Dynasty, my buddy Mi Fei and I—in the Blue-Green Style.
How many turquoise ornaments and lapislazuli hair-pins I have pulverized to get those colors!
For fun we would copy each other's paintings and sign them with our own names. Who could know—in the eleventh century—that Mi would hit the big time and become world famous?

Those paintings bearing his name in the Palace Museum, Taipe, and in the Freer Gallery, Boston are really mine!
And I want them back.

A small bird, tired of disturbing the air with his fluttering, pretends to be a golf-ball.
Now he is patiently waiting for Tiger Woods to take a swing at the irresistible form.
He knows Tiger won't hit a birdie.

Of course, you wouldn't want to stay here, in the land of freedom—where chance and accident create wonders.
Especially accidents—you don't want those!

So go back down, where the air is thick. Where old men sit in overheated rooms, reminiscing how they cheated the system, each other, and themselves.
No human being lives here. Dragons play in the mist and clouds.
Behind the waterfall they have their secret caves…

Don't blame men for being so aggressive. They, too, have become like this only through Natural Selection.
And who—naturally—does the selecting?
Women.
This rooster is challenging a rock to a fist-fight because that's what chicks like in a guy.

One evening, after he had already conquered half The World, Alexander the Great was relaxing in his tent.
He was getting drunk with his comrade and childhood friend, Benny. Benny was beginning to wobble, and as he passed the bottle to The Great Alexander he said: "Alekshh, that shtuff about you bein' the son of a god is a bunch of shit. Right? Ha, ha ha."
Alex ran his spear through his friend's chest and took another slug.
Later he was kind of sorry for it.

After what he did to the couch— I'm not giving him a Christmas tree this year.

"…must have inhaled a pine-needle."

Like all the other paintings here, this is definitely one of my best paintings!

Notice that these little creatures don't have cigarettes dangling from their beaks.
What does that tell you?
They are trying to stop smoking.