See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

見猿聞か猿言わ猿 (mizaru kikazaru iwazaru): see not, hear not, say not. The monkeys came first. Three monkeys with their hands over eyes, ears and mouth are in a 1597 manuscript, in a Kyoto hall by 1632 and on roadside stones by the 1780s, and the sentence first appears in 1649 as a pun on them: 猿, monkey, for the negative ざる. The old sense is restraint about other people's faults, and the Japanese tradition adds a fourth monkey, that not seeing, hearing and saying are the easy three and not thinking is the hard one. The evil in the English is Lafcadio Hearn's word of 1894; the Japanese names no object.