Why are the 'Three Wise Monkeys' Usually APES?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Wise_Monkeys

The three wise monkeys (Japanese: 三猿, san'en or sanzaru, or 三匹の猿, sanbiki no saru, literally "three monkeys"), sometimes called the three mystic apes,^[1] are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".^[2] The three monkeys are Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil; Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil. Sometimes there is a fourth monkey depicted with the three others; the last one, Shizaru, symbolizes the principle of "do no evil". He may be shown crossing his arms.
There are various meanings ascribed to the monkeys and the proverb including associations with being of good mind, speech and action. In the Western world the phrase is often used to refer to those who deal with impropriety by turning a blind eye.^[3]
In English, the monkeys' names are often given as Mizaru,^[4] Mikazaru,^[5] and Mazaru,^[6] but the last two names were corrupted from the Japanese originals.^[7][8]
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In Chinese, a similar phrase exists in the Analects of Confucius from 2nd to 4th century B.C.: "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" (非禮勿視, 非禮勿聽, 非禮勿言, 非禮勿動).^[9] It may be that this phrase was shortened and simplified after it was brought into Japan.
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Though the teaching had nothing to do with monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a simple play on words. The saying in Japanese is "mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru" (見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる, literally "don't see, don't hear, don't speak". However, -zaru, an archaic negative verb conjugation, is pronounced the same as zaru, the vocalized form of saru (猿^?), "monkey", so the saying can also be interpreted as the names of three monkeys.
It is also possible that the three monkeys came from a more central root than a play on words.^{[contradiction]} The shrine at Nikko is a Shinto shrine, and the monkey is an extremely important being in the Shinto religion.^{[citation needed]} The monkey is believed to be the messenger of the Hie Shinto shrines, which also have connections with Tendai Buddhism. There are even important festivals that are celebrated during the year of the Monkey (occurring every twelve years) and a special festival is celebrated every sixteenth year of the Kōshin.
"The Three Mystic Apes" (Sambiki Saru) were described as "the attendants of Saruta Hito no Mikoto or Kōshin, the God of the Roads".^[10] The Kōshin festival was held on the 60th day of the calendar. It has been suggested that during the Kōshin festival, according to old beliefs, one’s bad deeds might be reported to heaven "unless avoidance actions were taken…." It has been theorized that the three Mystic Apes, Not Seeing, Hearing, or Speaking, may have been the "things that one has done wrong in the last 59 days."
According to other accounts, the monkeys caused the Sanshi and Ten-Tei not to see, say or hear the bad deeds of a person. The Sanshi (三尸^?) are three worms living in everyone's body. The Sanshi keep track of the good deeds and particularly the bad deeds of the person they inhabit. Every 60 days, on the night called Kōshin-Machi (庚申待^?), if the person sleeps, the Sanshi will leave the body and go to Ten-Tei (天帝^?), the Heavenly God, to report about the deeds of that person. Ten-Tei will then decide to punish bad people, making them ill, shortening their time alive, and in extreme cases putting an end to their lives. Those believers of Kōshin who have reason to fear will try to stay awake during Kōshin nights. This is the only way to prevent the Sanshi from leaving their body and reporting to Ten-Tei.
An ancient representation of the 'no see, no hear, no say, no do' can be found in four golden figurines in the Zelnik Istvan Southeast Asian Gold Museum. These golden statues date from the 6th to 8th century. The figures look like tribal human people with not very precise body carvings and strong phallic symbols.^[11] This set indicates that the philosophy comes from very ancient roots.

References

• Titelman, Gregory Y. (2000). Random House Dictionary of America's Popular Proverbs and Sayings (Second Edition ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-70584-8.
• Archer Taylor, “Audi, Vidi, Tace” and the three monkeys
• A. W. Smith, Folklore, Vol. 104, No. ½ pp 144–150 ‘On the Ambiguity of the Three Wise Monkeys’

 External links

• Collector's picture gallery
• Information compiled by collectors
• Monkey(saru)-Kōshin on onmarkproductions.com
• More Information compiled by Collectors

At first the representations of the three monkeys were clearly recognisable Japanese macaques ("Snow monkeys") and this included the clear representation of their stumpy tails.

However, that is not the way they are most commonly known. They are most commonly represented as small APES often resembling chimpanzees but usually more ambiguously suggesting the features of both chiomps and orangutans.

 

Since there are still reports of smallish apelike creatures on Japan under the common term "Hibagon" and we have seen reporesentations of them before on this blog, it seems more likely that the common representation of the three wise monkeys actually ARE representations of three wise apes, the Japanese native apes that seem to be related to the Smaller kind of Chinese Yeren and thence to the fossil Orangutans known to have existed in China

Illustration of the Chinese Yeren as an orangutan-like creature

 as done by R. W. Benjamin on the Unknown Creatures site

Xing-Xing or similar ape, wood carving from Taiwan,

the term Xing-Xing (Shing-Shing) is in general casual use in the Orient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dj%C5%8D

 

 

Sculpture of an obvious orangutan located at Hong Kong

 

Small "See No Evil (etc) figurines like these come from the Burmese/Thailand border country and they are referred to under the name of the local Yeti equivalent, the Tok. The bare remnants of a "Monkey" face can be made out in the gilded example below.

"King Louis" from the Disney version of The Jungle Book, a representation of the Olu-Bandar under the title "King of the Monkeys". The character was introduced by Bill Peet while he was working on the script and nobody seems to know where he came by this information: there is such a creature alleged in the Assam and Heuvelmans refers it to the "Mainland Orangutan" category. There was not such a creature mentioned in Kipling's original Jungle Book with Mowgli.

Two small votive orangutan figurines in brass from Tibet, listed for sale on Ebay.

One of the Yeti stamps from Bhutan that bears a distinct resemblance to a male (Sumatan) Orangutan. Similar orangutan like creatures are depicted in midieval Persian miniature paintings.

Above are the two types of stamp-Yetis done to the same scale. Yes, the bigger one has a tail attributed to it, but that part is never actually reported on live individuals that are supposedly sighted. Below are two depictions of the two types pasted together at the same scale.


Following is the article on Chinese Yerens from George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures (2002) Although there are different kinds of creatures called by the same names Yeti and Yeren, Bernard Heuvelmans counts the two as equivalent and related concept and indeed the main types (discounting the local Wild Men) are the larger and smaller kinds just indicated above. The same types also continue on Southward. The general range in heights as being 4 to 10 feet tall holds for both places (discounting the even larger sizes) and I draw attention to the statement "Color varies from black in Yunnan provence to white in Tibet and reddish-brown in Hubei Provence"--That's right people, the big Yetis in Tibet ARE said to be white! {actually they are usually shades of gry or "Grizzly" and white commonly. This is the Gigantopithecus type that would be the same as the North American Sasquatch). And the smaller reddish-brown one in Nepal is the one the press has taken to calling "the Yeti": it is most likely a kind of orangutan derived from the Chinese "fossil Pongo" of the Pleistocee.

Bigfoot (Orangutan) Fingerprints

Uploaded by SUSANFARNS on Feb 10, 2010
FOLLOWING UP ON THE VIDEO "BIGFOOT FINGERPRINTS", WE ACTUALLY DUSTED THE CAMERA AND WAS ABLE TO PULL UP A SINGLE USABLE FINGERPRINT. HUMAN OR BIGFOOT? WE DON'T KNOW.

Mitchell Waite
One of my cameras got beat up and took pictures of the hands doing the beating. They were not human hands, but more like an orangutan. I fingerprinted the camera and got one good print. The dermal ridges went straight across the print. No loops, no swirls, no waves which means not human. In the video you will see microscope photos across the print. The dermal ridges are as straight as can be. This leads me to believe the photos were not optical illusions, but he real thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfbH0hwyfQk

A handprint shown in the mud at the end is csertainly like an orangutan's hand. Red hairs were said to be afdhering to the camera

This is a comparison of an orangutan hand print with the el Reno (Oklahoma) Henhouse raider's handprint illustrated by Loren Coleman as one of the basic evidences for a North American Ape (NAPE). When I heard of Mitchell's video I remembered this immediately and made up the paste-up. Below is a comparison for reference including a cast hand of a male orangutan and a scientific drawing made of another.

Tracks and track casts of the type include the basic Himalayan Yeti (Far Left) and the Orang Pendek (Right at top), The Chinese Yeren as an extension of the Yeti's range (track shown at lower Left, toes evidently clencheded together rather than being spread out as in the other tracks) and the North American Skunk Apes and Swam Apes (Cast from Pennsylvania shown at Lower Right)

 

Going by the tracks it is possible to reconstruct the foot as being a groundliving ancestor to the Orangutans, with a foot adapted to walking fl;at on the sole rather than adapted to climbing as in the known modern orangutans. I have unofficially christened this ancestor Protopongo in recognition of its special status and we could very well have fossils of it already but mistakenly referred to as being "Fossil Pongo" (Pongo being the genus of modern orangutans and the mistaken assumption being that they are the same species as modern orangutans) Protopongo is on the left and Pongo on the right: I might well have made the big toe too developed since it is reduced in all of the known tracks. The toe coming out in that location and at that angle is well known in fossil apes and in several genera is thought to be an adaptation to walking bipedally.

Just to show it again, this is the chart I made up when I discovered that the "Smaller Yeti" really was the same as the apefooted version of the Orang Pendek and both of them basically orangutans adapted to living on the groundlow is an amended family tree which I just made up to show te relationships of the known apes together with the Cryptid apes (If your tasrtes run to leaving Homo Sapiens off the chart you may do so without affecting the rest of the chart: s chart by rearranging the Jay Maternes chart also appended below it. I much prefer my verson, naturally)

When I mentioned the orangutan connection in one of the Facebook groups where Mitchell had posted, I mentioned that the more manlike Eastern Bigfoot had a more Neanderthaloid structure: here is a comparison of a Bigfoot hand in mud from Texas to  of a Neanderthal and at Left is the outline of a "Grassman" footprint form Ohio, a very good Neanderthal type track. Other tracks of the same type are narrower, possibly representing females and juveniles.

And both the Apelike type of track and the Neanderthal type are different to the Sasquatch, shown in the form of a couple of casts above and a possible reconstruction of how the foot is structured below. Basically the foot has toes like a gorilla or chimpanzee but aligned as a human being BUT at the same time the toes can spread out much more widely than a human's foot, and you can have cks where the toes are clenched in together or spread widely apart in the same trackway. This arrangement of the toes is beyong anything possible for regular human beings and suggests that the biological identity of the Sasquatch is very different from either the more manlike or the more apelike types. This goes along with the observation that creatures that leave these tracks are very larger and that they have the much smaller, characteristically pointed heads as adults

Best Wishes, Dale D.

Miocene Apes and The Smaller Yeti (Migu)

Reconstruction-portraits for the Scientific American article on Miocene apes, artwork by John Gurche on the left. The two reconstructions above represent forms of Sivapithecus, thought to have been directly ancestral to the Orangutans of Asia. Miocene apes in general seem to have gone through the three stages illustrated at left: the small and early Proconsuls which had apelike teeth but had be monkeys and lived much like them when they were in their heydays went more or less directly into the larger and more diversified Dryopithecines (best represented in Europe) and then on to the more fully apelike forms typified by Sivapithecus. John Gurche remarks that Sivapithecus took everything that made apes distinctive and then exaggerated the features as much as they could.l chart placing fossil apes and humans together and showing their assumed relationships.

Fig. 1 Reconstructions and partial reconstructions of the craniums of fossil apes: (a) Proconsul, (b) Afropithecus, (c) Oreopithecus, (d) Ouranopithecus, (e) Sivapithecus, and (f) Ankarapithecus.

Oreopithecus, one of the Miocene apes of which we have full skeletons, and its reconstruction below. It has bipedal adaptations and limb proportions about like a gorilla, and it evidently had an ecleclectic selection of locomotor modes including suspesnion by the arms ("Swinging through the Trees") Please note the widely opposed big toe of the foot in the painting below.

Ardipithecus feet, much more recent fossil form but evidently still the conservative form of the hands and feet, much like Oreopithecus (skeletons for Ardi hands and feet below)mal stance on the ground includes a widely-spread big toe. Ardipithecus survived until about four million years ago and is thought to have been directly ancestral to Australopithecus.

Hands of fossil apes. The two hands on the left are different specimens of Oreopithecus, which are smaller and more generalized than the later ape pictured on the right, with more obvious adaptations for brachiation and knuckle-walking.   are shown below, indicating how far out the opposed big toe could rotate.

Oreopithecus and the other conservative early apes, right up to Ardipithecus, had the same shorter toes and widely-separated big toe as shown in casts of the Orang Pendek feet. The orangutan and Chimpanzee ancestors both had feet of this type, it was the primitive pattern. More specializations related to climbing trees followed this stage, including having the fingers and toes grow longer and more curved, and the arms lengthened and legs shortened along with this (the primitive condition has all four legs at about the same length, and even in the conservative ape types this also tends to be true. Knuckle-walking developed at different times in all three lines of great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) and they all have different adaptations to it: the way that chimpanzees and orangutans hold the hands when they are on all fours are also quite distinctive from one another.

The Miocene apes began to radiate out into different ecological niches by exploring different modes of locomotion. The more conservative types of Miocene apes were upright on the ground on they had committed to climbing upright in the trees rather than running along branches on all fours like monkeys do. The pattern of locomotive flexibility survived up until the Australopithecines came along, and Bonobos still tend to be that way.The earlier types of apes such as Proconsul still had the limb proportions of a baboon and they walked flat on the soles and palms of the hands, like the monkeys still do.

Above, mural at the AMNH done by Jay Matternes showing Sivapithecus climbing upright and contrasted with Proconsuls running on all fours. At right, the skeleton for the primitive proconsuls and below, a reconstruction. A small proconsul would have been the size of a rhesus monkey and a big one the size of a big baboon: they rarely stood up on their hind legs alone.

Incidentally, NO species of Miocene or Pliocene apes known from fossils has been definitively identified as being a knuckle-walker like the modern great apes. NONE of them.

A variety of early apes at the Proconsul and Dryopithecus level. These early apes were ecologically replaced by Old World monkeys when it turned out the monkeys could breed faster. They are sometimes called "Dental apes" because about the only way you could tell they were apes was from their teeth. Gibbons also descended from them and developed arm-suspension tree-climbing and brachiation or "Swinging through the trees" independantly of the other apes. Some of thir early relatives also still had tails-and long tails at that

Above, some later African apes began to develop the adaptations typical of gorillas and chimpanzees. In Asia the descendants of Sivapithecus did also, but independantly with different adaptations.

Sivapithecus fossil and Orangutan skull.

Sivapithecus males and females were so dimporphic (differene from each other) that originally their fssils were put into distinct genera, the females being thought to be much more advanced. At the right, a very "Yeti"-like reconstruction portrait.

Above some more reconstructions showalking upright on the ground, and the skeleton of Ardipithecus which still showed adaptations for walking upright on the ground, in the conservative Miocene Ape pattern. The immediate ancestors of the orangutans were the descendants of Sivapithecus which lived in Southern Asia and were walking upright on the same primitive (Orang Pendek) pattern of feet, but they grew to about the same size as gorillas so we know they were NOT living in trees nor yet would they have any of the usual orangutan adaptations for living in the trees as a consequence. Paleontologists commonly call the remains "Fossil Pongo" in the absence of a better names no real agreement over the classification. The "Fossil Pongo" is undoubtedly the dirsct forerunner of the "Yetis", Yerens, Xing-xings and Hibagons. Below at left is Michel Raynal's depiction of "le Petit Yeti" of Heuvelmans, the smaller red-haired type of "Abominable Snowman" described by the Sherpas: educated Tibetans translate the meaning of its name as being  like "Chimpanzee". At the right is Dale Drinnon's reconstruction drawing of the same creature done as an illustration submitted to PURSUIT in the 1990s, ultimately never published. The two reconstructions shae many similarities and the fact that each one was made independantly and without any knowledge of the other is somsupport the idea tat the representations could be getting near to the truth of the matter.