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“SEE no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” say the three sacred monkeys carved over the gate of the Buddhist temple of Iyeyasu at Nikko.
We all of us speak ill of one another:
“No one,” Pascal remarks, “speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence. The union that exists among men is based solely on this mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each knew what his friend says when he is not there, though he be speaking of him in all sincerity and without passion.
“I lay it down as a fact that, if all men knew what they say of one another, there would not be four friends in this world.”
If you do away with evil-speaking, you do away with three-fourths of our conversation; and an unbearable silence will hover over every gathering. Evil-speaking or calumny—for it is extremely difficult to separate the two sisters; and in reality any evil-speaking is likely to be calumnious, inasmuch as we know others even less well than we know ourselves—evil-speaking, which feeds all that creates disunion between men and poisons their intercourse, is nevertheless the chief motive that brings them together and enables them to enjoy the pleasures of society.
But the ravages which it wreaks all around us are too well-known and have too often been described to make it necessary for us to portray them once again. Let us here consider only the harm which it does to him who indulges in it. It accustoms him to see only the petty sides of men and things; little by little it conceals from him the bold outlines, the great unities, the heights and depths containing the only truths that count and endure.
In reality, the evil which we find in others, the evil which we speak of them, exists within ourselves: from ourselves we derive it; upon ourselves it recoils. We perceive clearly only those defects which are ours, or which we are on the point of acquiring. Within ourselves is kindled the evil flame whose reflection we perceive on others. Each of us diligently searches out, among those who surround him, the vice or the defect that reveals to the clear-sighted the vice or the defect to which he himself is thrall. There is no more ingenuous or intimate confession, even as there is no better examination of conscience, than to ask one’s self:
“What is the fault which I most willingly impute to my neighbour?”
You may be sure that this is the fault which you are most inclined to commit and that you most readily see what is happening in the shallows to which you yourself are descending. He who speaks ill of others is, in short, merely his own traducer; and evil-speaking is, in essence, but the story of our own falls, transposed or anticipated.