Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil means deliberately ignoring wrongdoing rather than admitting it or reporting it. Used that way it is a criticism. The words describe the three wise monkeys, a carved panel on the sacred stable at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan, finished in 1636, and the lesson they stand for is older still.
What is the origin of the phrase ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’?
The phrase ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ is derived from Buddhist teachings of the three wise monkeys, possibly dating back to at least the first century BC. These three monkeys are a visual maxim, symbolising the Buddhist principle “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. The three monkeys are:
Mizaru, who covers his eyes and “sees no evil.”
Kikazaru, who covers his ears and “hears no evil.”
Iwazaru, who covers his mouth and “speaks no evil.”
The Buddhist teachings said that if we do not hear, see or speak evil, we ourselves shall be spared from evil. A 17th century carving over a door of a stable of the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan popularised this visual maxim. Now, the three wise monkeys are frequently depicted in sculptures, paintings, and other forms of art across cultures.
That carving can be dated closely. Nippon.com’s guide to Nikkō Tōshōgū records that the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, had his grandfather’s plainer shrine rebuilt on a lavish scale, and that “The work was completed in 1636, and the imperial court bestowed the name Tōshōgū on the shrine nine years later.” The monkeys are not a stand-alone image there. Nippon.com counts the panel as “one of eight monkey carvings on the stable for sacred horses within the shrine precincts, as monkeys were thought to be protectors of horses.”
The three names are a pun that works only in Japanese. Nippon.com glosses them as “mizaru (do not see), kikazaru (do not hear), and iwazaru (do not speak)” and points out that the names also play on saru, the Japanese word for monkey. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason had already explained the joke to English readers in the third edition of A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (John Murray, 1894), under their entry for Kōshin, the deified day of the monkey in the Chinese sexagesimal cycle: “This being the day of the monkey, it is represented by three monkeys (sam-biki-zaru) called respectively, by a play upon words, mi-zaru, kika-zaru, and iwa-zaru.” Each name is a negative verb form ending in -zaru, and that ending doubles as the word for the animal doing the refusing.
A closely similar lesson is older than the carving, and Chinese rather than Japanese. In book twelve of the Analects, Confucius answers his disciple Yan Yuan’s question about perfect virtue with four prohibitions, given in James Legge’s translation as “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety.” Three of those four are the three monkeys’ refusals; the fourth, about movement, has no monkey.
When the phrase ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ came over to the West, the meaning of the phrase changed considerably. In the West, the phrase is used to express the deliberate ignoring of bad behaviour or wrongdoing. When the phrase is used in this context it has the same meaning as the phrase ‘turn a blind eye’.
That English reading is already in print by 1894. Describing the Kōshin stones set up along country roads across rural Japan, Chamberlain and Mason write that the three monkeys were carved on them in relief, “the idea being that this curious trinity will neither see, hear, nor speak any evil.” At Nikkō itself they found the monkeys over the stable doors “represented as closing their ears and mouth and shading their eyes with their hands”, and gave them the local name san-gokwu no saru, the monkeys of the three countries, meaning India, China and Japan. The fixed three-part English wording follows in the early twentieth century. The intertitles of the 1922 American silent film Shadows, directed by Tom Forman, include the cards “See no evil”, “Hear no evil” and “Speak no evil”; and by 1926 the little figures were common enough to stock a curio shop in a Weird Tales story, set out among “cases of beads, carved ivory, jade, statuettes of Buddha, the Three Wise Monkeys of many sizes and materials.”
What are some notable uses of the phrase ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’?
Franklin D. Roosevelt used the first two parts of the phrase in his fireside chat of 29 December 1940, the broadcast in which he told Americans “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” Answering a telegram that had begged him not to spell out how easily American cities could be bombed, he said it “expressed the attitude of the small minority who want to see no evil and hear no evil, even though they know in their hearts that evil exists.” He was describing wilful ignorance, which is what the phrase has come to mean in English.
The 1989 American thriller comedy film ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil’, directed by Arthur Hiller, takes its title from the phrase ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’. It was a big hit, and starred Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor as a deaf man and a blind man who witnessed a murder. ‘Speak no evil’ is missing from the title, which is part of the joke in a film that features a great deal of swearing.