善缘 (shàn yuán) — Good Affinity · A Connection Formed Well · The Tie You Can Go Out and Make

On the eighth day of the fourth month, in the Beijing of the 1630s, people boiled beans and gave them away on the street. 刘侗 and 于奕正 wrote the custom down in 《帝京景物略》 in 1635: a handful of beans, one recitation of the Buddha's name over each bean, then the beans cooked and offered to whoever was passing. Eating one made a connection. Nearly three centuries later 富察敦崇 recorded the same practice still running in 《燕京岁时记》 (1906), and he is careful about who was doing it: 都人之好善者, the charitable people of the capital, handing out what he calls 舍缘豆 — beans of given connection. Nobody in that transaction knows who anyone is, and nobody finds out what came of it. What the custom demonstrates is the grammatical fact underneath this word: a 缘 can be handed over. You can do it before lunch.

That is not true of 缘 by itself, which is the difficulty the compound had to solve. Left alone the character reports rather than acts: it is a finding entered once the meeting is over and its consequences are in, and a finding is not something anyone can be told to go and produce. What 善 does to it is change the tense. 善 attaches to the making, and the making happens at a moment somebody is present for — which is how a word whose whole grammar points backward ends up with an imperative in front of it.

善 is the grade, and the grade lands on the forming rather than on the feeling. In the same translation workshops 善 was taking on kuśala, which is closer to skilful than to morally nice — competent, wholesome, done in a way that works. So 善缘 does not mean a connection that is pleasant. It means one that was made well, which is why the compound survives in ordinary speech attached to a verb: 结善缘, to tie one, and 广结善缘, to tie them widely. 缘 keeps the accounting, and the accounting stays out of your hands. 善 is the part you are responsible for, and it is settled at the moment of the making, long before anyone can say what the tie was worth.

There is a standard word for a tie that was formed badly and will not come apart: 孽缘. It is not obscure or literary — it is what people say about the relationship everyone around it could see was wrong and nobody in it could leave. 恶缘 covers the same ground in a more scriptural register, where the word came from. The verb works identically across all of them; 结 ties a 善缘 and a 孽缘 with equal ease, and grammar offers no hint about which is being made at the time. This is what keeps 善 in 善缘 from being ornamental. If every connection counted as good, the word would be saying nothing, and Chinese would not have needed the other two.

In ordinary speech 广结善缘 is advice, usually given by someone older to someone starting out, and it is more practical than it sounds. What it warns against is 把路走窄 — narrowing the road — by treating each dealing as though it were the last one you would have with that person. The instruction does not ask for warmth and does not promise a return; it asks that the conditions be left in good order. 惜缘, to hold a connection carefully once it exists, and 随缘, to stop forcing one that does not, cover the two cases after the fact. 结善缘 is the only one of the three you can act on this afternoon, and it is the only one that never tells you whether it worked. People who have been given the advice and taken it generally cannot point to which of the ties paid off, which is the ordinary experience the word is built to describe rather than a shortcoming in it.