Here’s some of my favourite quotes from the totally insane but brilliant TV show Monkey. Silly jokes and Buddhist philosophy – you can’t go wrong…

“Just because you’re a Dragon it doesn’t make you better than me.” – Monkey

“There is one, it is infinite. Yet what is called Buddha fills it. The one takes myriad forms, since everything is a form of the whole. Forms change, the one does not change. Its total is always the same. If the pilgrims come at last to Buddha’s Western Paradise, what will be changed?”

“The wicked go to hells, the good go to heavens and the pure neither live nor even die, but those hit on the head tend to fall unconscious.”

“Desire is a trap. Lustful desire makes pigs of people, and slaves of pigs. One single word makes possible all civilisation. It’s a small word, a magic word, yet it transforms, frees everyone. You must whisper it to yourself. The word is – no.”

“Even silence cannot make a wise man out of a fool, wherever he travels.”

“There are worlds within worlds, some better, some worse. Not the least extraordinary are worlds which can be found in the internal plumbing of a demon in cosmic manifestation.”

“Even a starving camel is still bigger than a horse.”

“There’s nothing so stubborn as a Buddhist, nothing so stupid as a priest. I mean, what’s he worshipping? Gods? I met the gods – bloody boring bunch!” – Monkey

“The strange fact is that the world goes on against all reasonable odds. A hundred years, and even unimaginable evil is just called history.”

“It is the beginning of wisdom to say I don’t know.”

“The master goes beyond the boundless land, and nothing, neither men nor demons nor Gods, nothing in all creation can hold him. Monkey is magic, a God, an immortal, but he is less than the Buddha in you.”

“Do what you have to do, said the Buddha, with all your heart. The traveller who drags his feet only raises dust.”

More about Monkey: Monkey Magic! or How Buddhism Came to China

Image: Monkey