Hanuman, the Monkey King, and Three at Nikko

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.