CJK Unified Ideograph-7331

It names a monkey-like primate, or a guqin vibrato. In animal writing, 猱 points to an agile climbing primate. Traditional glosses do not settle one species: some call it a macaque, while others connect it with the gibbon or ape family. The practical translation is “monkey-like primate,” unless the passage supplies a narrower clue.

The earliest recognizable ancestor is 夒, recorded in Shang oracle-bone writing from the 14th–11th centuries BCE. In royal hunting divinations, the animal graph served to name game. Later forms include 獿 and the simpler 猱; the chain is an evolution of a primate word, not a one-off invention. The Erya then ties 猱猿 to climbing, the trait later writers kept foregrounding.

Why does 猱 appear in guqin writing?

In guqin notation, 猱 means a pronounced left-hand vibrato. Players move the stopping finger back and forth on the string; 吟 names the smaller wavering motion, while 猱 names the larger one. This is a specialist performance instruction, not a metaphorical monkey.

That technical sense gives the character a second life. Beside 吟 it functions as performance vocabulary, so the same glyph needs a different translation in a dictionary entry, a classical passage, or a score.

Is 猱 the same as 猿 or 猴?

No: 猱, 猿, and 猴 overlap, but they are not interchangeable. 猿 is the familiar ape or gibbon character in many compounds; 猴 is the ordinary modern “monkey” character. 猱 is older and more literary, and historical commentators disagree about its exact zoological boundary. Use the surrounding text instead of forcing 猱 into a modern species label.

In 教猱升木, the animal is no longer the whole point. The phrase invokes a creature already good at climbing and becomes a warning about urging or enabling a wrongdoer to do harm. In a modern message, that allusion is sharper than a literal monkey reference.