Monkey

The monkey's manipulative hands and evident intelligence have made it a figure of both wit and disorder across Asia. Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana, is among the most popularly worshipped figures in Hinduism, invoked for strength, courage and above all selfless devotion. The sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West gives Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a genuinely subversive trickster who storms heaven and defies its bureaucracy before being bound to a Buddhist pilgrimage. The three wise monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil are Japanese, carved in the seventeenth century at the Toshogu shrine at Nikko, and the saying turns on a pun on the negative verb ending -zaru, which also sounds like monkey.

Japan gives the monkey a second religious role beyond the carved proverb at Nikko: in the Sanno Shinto tradition centred on Hie shrines, the monkey, saru, is regarded as the messenger and servant of the mountain deity, and living or carved monkeys are kept at Sanno shrines across Japan for that reason; the word saru also puns on a verb meaning to leave or drive away, so monkey charms and images have long been used against misfortune and evil on that wordplay alone, independent of the shrine tradition.

The monkey is the ninth sign of the Chinese zodiac. As a birth-sign it is read for cleverness, versatility, curiosity and a mischievous, sometimes unreliable ingenuity, the trickster temperament that Sun Wukong embodies at literary length. It is associated with the late-afternoon hours and, in the elemental scheme, with metal. Of the twelve it is the sign most explicitly tied to intelligence and quick problem-solving, and popular character-reading treats the monkey-born as sociable, inventive and easily bored. The calendrical monkey and the divine and literary monkeys reinforce one another: a creature admired for cleverness and distrusted for using it.

The monkey enters Chinese decorative art through a specific pun: a monkey riding on a horse's back, ma shang feng hou, reads literally as monkey on horse but sounds identical to a phrase meaning to be ennobled immediately, so paintings and carvings of a monkey mounted on a horse were popular gifts wishing swift promotion, an entirely independent tradition from the zodiac sign though drawing on the same animal. The monkey most often pictured in this zodiac imagery is the rhesus macaque, Macaca mulatta, native to China and one of the most widely distributed primates on Earth after humans, a real and adaptable animal quite distinct from Sun Wukong, the entirely fictional Monkey King of Journey to the West.