domokun1134
Member
From: Staten Island NY
Registered: 2009-11-10
Posts: 70
Obviously I know it means "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" by looking it up in the dictionary. What I don't quite understand however is where the "evil" part comes in. Also, the ざる form of verbs I'm not familiar with. Can someone shed some light? Thanks.
iSoron
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2008-03-24
Posts: 490
domokun1134 wrote:
So it's just the monkey's names.
ざる is a conjugation of ざり, which in turn is a contraction of ずあり. These days it's used mostly in proverbs and set expressions, like ~ざるを得ない. It means the same as ぬ and ない. 「見ない、聞かない、言わない」. It's not just the monkey's names.
Also, 「見猿, 聞か猿, 言わ猿」is just a pun; ざる has no kanji form.
What I don't quite understand however is where the "evil" part comes in.
Maybe it comes from another form of this proverb (there are many, in many languages; nobody knows which, if any, is the original); maybe it's just the translator being too creative. A more literal translation is "see not, hear not, speak not".
Tzadeck
Member
From: Kinki
Registered: 2009-02-21
Posts: 2484
As it says in the Wikipedia article Ice Cream posted, it's really from the Analects of Confucius, "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." Sometimes there is a fourth monkey to coincide with the last part of the quote. It's really a Chinese proverb, just the monkeys are Japanese.
ざる is not from monkey, it's the other way around. ざる is from a negative verb, and portraying it as monkeys was just a pun.
"Which is contrary to propriety" sounds pretty dated, so people talking about it in English simplified it to "no evil."
I knew what it meant just by the monkeys alone. I just didn't realize that it was originally a Japanese proverb. Cool.