Dear Mr. Know-It-All,
In a business meeting the other week someone said that it was “yuanfen” that we should work together. What does that mean? – Yuan is the Loneliest Number
Yuanfen (緣分), or, in Cantonese, yuen fun, is an inescapably complicated concept that’s often translated for ease of reference as “destiny,” or “fate.” But there’s far more to yuanfen than that.
In its most religious version, the power behind yuanfen derives as the result of your previous lives and incarnations, like karma: Good deeds in your previous life lead to good yuanfen in this one. But whereas karma is about the self, yuanfen is about you and others.
Yuanfen is most frequently applied to relationships. It’s an innate sense of connection and binding to another person—romantic or otherwise. So a long overdue meeting between two people could be ascribed to yuanfen. So could repeatedly running into someone you know all over the globe.
You know when you meet someone for the first time, and realize that you are going to be great friends? That’s yuanfen. When you fall in love—yuanfen.
But it’s not just providence, or destiny, or serendipity, or fate. There is a unique sense of timing to yuanfen. It encapsulates the concept that everything that has happened in your life up until this point has led to this meeting. Yuanfen is an all-encompassing idea that the universe has somehow conspired to create this one event. In the face of yuanfen, who are you to struggle?