The early Buddhists taught that the senses, the eyes, the ears, the speech, the body itself, are gateways to the mind, and that a wise man guards his gates the way a daimyo guards his castle. The idea is old and it travelled far. It reached Japan around the eighth century by way of a Tendai Buddhist legend out of China, and somewhere along that road it collected a pinch of Confucius, who had put the matter rather more crisply some two thousand years earlier: 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.
None of this, you will notice, is an instruction to stick one’s head in the sand. It is about clarity, not ignorance.
And then, in the seventeenth century, these lofty axioms landed on the backs of a troop of Japanese macaques carved above the door of the sacred stable at Nikko, and there they have remained ever since.
- Mizaru, See No Evil. Avoid harmful sights, negativity, and corrupting influences.
- Kikazaru, Hear No Evil. Avoid gossip, slander, and harmful speech.
- Iwazaru, Speak No Evil. Practice mindful speech; words are actions.
- Shizaru, Do No Evil. Act ethically; refrain from harmful deeds.
Why monkeys at all? Because of a pun, which is a wonderfully undignified foundation for a moral philosophy. In old Japanese, -zaru is a suffix that negates a verb, meaning roughly “not to do.” It also happens to sound like saru, which means monkey. See not, hear not, say not. Mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru. The whole edifice of Eastern restraint rests on a bit of wordplay, and I find that immensely comforting.
Now, a small matter of accounting. Everyone knows three monkeys. The carvers at Nikko gave us three, the souvenir shops sell three, and three is what your grandmother had on her mantelpiece. But go back to Confucius and count again. There are four prohibitions, not three. The fourth, make no movement contrary to propriety, is the one that never made it onto the stable wall. Shizaru was not a later addition bolted on by some enterprising gift shop. He was there at the beginning and got left out of the group photograph, the Pete Best of the primate world, quietly dropped before the act became famous.
Some say the woodcarver ran out of wall. Some say three simply looked better, which in matters of design it usually does. My own suspicion is that his particular virtue, doing no evil, was the one that required actual effort, and was therefore the first to be cut. In any case I have restored him here, because he is the only one of the four I can still claim with a straight face.
Together they map onto the Buddhist ideal of purity in mind, speech, and body. A code, if you will. Not quite bushido, but a code nonetheless.
Mahatma Gandhi kept a set. Three of them, small, made of china clay, a gift from the Japanese monk Nichidatsu Fujii. He named them Bapu, Ketan, and Bandar. Consider what that means. Here was a man who had methodically divested himself of nearly everything a person can own, and the exception he permitted himself, the one possession he could not part with, was three little monkeys on his desk. If they were good enough for that great man, they are good enough for this considerably less great one.
I am mindful of my speech. I refrain from harmful deeds; Shizaru, you may recall, is traditionally depicted dutifully protecting his crotch with his hands, a posture I have adopted with the discipline of a samurai at morning drill. As for the other two monkeys, advancing age has ensured my compliance without any effort whatsoever on my part. Fate. It is written. What can a man do against his karma?
Consider Kikazaru. As our age goes, so goes our hearing. The older me hears No Evil. Mind you, I don’t hear much of anything. What did you say? What do you mean I’m not here? I am standing directly in front of you.
Normal hearing operates on a scheme so gloriously elaborate it puts a Rube Goldberg machine to shame. Allow me, as a recovering physician, to explain.
Sound waves from the world reach the ear and strike the eardrum, a fingernail sized oval membrane. Abutting it on the inner side is a chain of three tiny bones. They have fancy Latin names, but we plebeians call them the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup, a blacksmith’s shop and a stable, conveniently located inside your skull. Sound makes the membrane vibrate, the little bones push and pull like pistons in the engine of your car, and the last of them, the stirrup, or stapes for the linguaphiles among us, taps back and forth on a tiny membrane guarding the inner ear. The inner ear is filled with fluid and lined with microscopic hairs that sway like seaweed in a tide pool. Their swaying creates an electrical impulse that travels up the eighth cranial nerve to the brain stem, heads north to the midbrain, and finally arrives at the temporal cortex, the seat of awareness.
And that, my dear sir, is how you know your wife is yelling at you.
Now, when this arrangement fails, it generally fails at the hands of one of two saboteurs, and if you are unlucky, as I have been, you get both. They work independently, from opposite ends of the corridor, and they have no idea the other one exists.
The first saboteur works in the middle ear. My stapes, for reasons that are hereditary rather than chronological, laid down extra bone around itself and gradually cemented itself in place, until it refused to move at all. A vassal who has decided he no longer serves this particular lord. The condition is called otosclerosis, and it is worth noting that it is not really a disease of old age; it usually announces itself in the twenties or thirties, then spends the following decades quietly tightening its grip while the owner blames the acoustics of restaurants. The sound simply stops at the gate. Nothing gets through to the inner ear because the messenger has stopped walking.
This one is fixable, and gloriously so. The ENT surgeon deposes the recalcitrant stapes and installs a titanium replacement, a piston the size of a comma. Hallelujah. Sound returns.
Which is when you meet the second saboteur, who has been at work all along and does not care about your titanium at all.
This one lives in the inner ear, among those swaying hairs, and its method is simple attrition. You are issued a fixed number of these hair cells at birth and no more; they do not grow back, and across a lifetime of restaurants, traffic, motorcycles, and other people’s music, they wear out and fall silent, one by one. The ones that handle high pitches go first. This is presbycusis, which translates, with brutal honesty, as “old hearing,” and it is what is actually happening to almost everybody who says “pardon?” at dinner.
Here is the cruelty of it. Vowels are low and loud, and they survive. Consonants are high and soft, and they are the first casualties. So the s goes, and the t, and the th, and the f, which are precisely the little hisses and taps that tell one word from another. The volume of the world holds up beautifully. The meaning of it quietly drains away. You hear perfectly well that your wife has said something. You simply cannot determine whether the word was “dinner” or “sinner,” a distinction upon which many a marriage has turned.
Understanding speech, it turns out, is a three man job. The ear converts moving air into electrical signal, which is the part the titanium fixed. The auditory cortex then sorts that signal by pitch and by timing, slicing a continuous river of noise into discrete pieces. Only then do the language centres, the old scholars in the back room, take the pieces and rule on what was actually said. Thousands of times a minute, without a single conscious thought from you. Take away the high frequencies and you have not made the room quieter; you have simply sent the scholars a document with half the letters missing and asked them to render judgment anyway.
So the titanium delivers the goods promptly, and then a pair of modern hearing aids goes to work on the second saboteur, putting the missing consonants back where they belong. This part takes patience. For a few weeks everything sounds artificial and overbright, because the scholars in the back room have grown accustomed to a quiet retirement and must be coaxed back to the bench, like an aging swordsman relearning a grip he thought he had forgotten. Then one morning it clicks, and you are back in business.
Which means, alas, that I must once again be mindful of the Hear No Evil monkey. Nothing in this life is free, neh?
And what of Mizaru, See No Evil?
The eye, human and animal alike, operates with the efficiency of a professional photographer’s Leica, or your latest iPhone. F-stop, shutter speed, focus, all child’s play for the human eye. But as we get older, the proteins in the lens break down into clumps and the lens grows cloudy. There is your cataract. Ever tried to admire Mount Fuji through a glass of milk?
Once again, modern medicine rides to the rescue. The eye surgeon removes the defective lens and replaces it with one made of acrylic or silicone (yes, the very same noble material that went into the creation of the 40DD breast; science, like water, finds its way everywhere), and voilà, I can see again.
Nobody warns you about what happens next. For years the cataract had been performing a service I never asked for and did not know I was receiving, a soft focus lens of the sort Hollywood once used on leading ladies of a certain age. Then the surgeon takes it away, and the world arrives in high definition, unedited and unforgiving. The house needs painting. The car is not silver, it is grey, and filthy. My wife’s expression when I ask her to repeat something for the third time is far more detailed than I had previously appreciated. Worst of all is the bathroom mirror at seven in the morning, which now presents, in glorious clarity, a gentleman I am fairly certain I have never met. Clarity, it turns out, is a two way street.
So there it is. Titanium in my ear, silicone in my eye, a pair of hearing aids restoring the consonants that time confiscated, and my hands exactly where Shizaru taught me to keep them. The gates of the castle, freshly repaired, must be guarded once more.
No need to travel to Japan. The whole drama plays out right here.