The Three Wise Monkeys.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume III, Issue 361, 21 February 1914, Page 2 (Supplement)

The Three Wise Monkeys.

Around the neck of Miss Bradley, a lady recently found tied up in a sack in Liverpool Docks, was a somewhat extraordinary medallion which has aroused a great deal of comment and some interest. On the one side-of it were engraved the figures of three monkeys with their hands in different attitudes. Underneath were the words: — “Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.”

’lhe other side had no picture, but bore only an inscription:— “Three wise monkeys with their eyes shut to evil, ears that hear only the right, lips that are dumb to scandal. They sit in their silent might.” A solution to the meaning of the above may be found in Murray’s handbook to Japan. In that country the monkey is called Koshin, meaning a deification of that day of the month which corresponds to the fifty-seventh term of the Chinese sexagenary cycle, which is known to the Japanese as Ka-no-esaru. The fifty-seventh day is known as the day of the monkey, and is represented by three monkeys, called respectively “wi-zurawa,” “kika-zaru, and “iwa-zaru,” meaning the blind monkey, the deaf monkey, and the dumb monkey, and they point the moral that one should neither see, speak, nor give ear to evil. There is a very beautiful representation of this deity in the Temple at Nikko, lying northward of Japan, right amongst the mountains. Many are the natives who pay homage to these strange animats. In. fact, representations of the monkeys carved in stone slabs are amongst the most usual objects, of devotion in the more rural districts of Japan. If the poor murdered woman lived, up to the words carved on the medallion, she has indeed been ill-repaid for the beauty of her nature.