缘 (yuán) — Affinity · The Edge Two Lives Ran Along · Why You Met at All

《礼记·深衣》 legislates a hem. The 深衣 was the plain full-length robe a gentleman wore when he was not in court dress, and the chapter setting out how to cut one spends a clause on the band sewn around its edges — a Chinese inch and a half wide at the sleeve-opening, at the hem, at the border. Then it does something a tailoring rule has no obvious business doing. It assigns that band a colour according to whether the wearer's parents are alive: 具父母、大父母，衣纯以缋 — with parents and grandparents living, the edging is embroidered; 具父母，衣纯以青, with parents living, it is blue-green; 如孤子，衣纯以素, and for a young man whose father is dead — 孤 is fatherless, not parentless — plain undyed silk. Anyone in the room could read a stranger's losses off the edge of his coat. 说文解字 (c. 100 CE) gives the character for that band three characters of definition — 緣，衣純也 — and files it under 糸, twisted silk, with 彖 supplying the sound. 缘 begins as sewing: the strip that runs along the line where the cloth stops.

An edge is a thing you can follow, and 段玉裁, whose commentary on the 说文 was completed in 1807, put the hinge in one clause: 緣者，沿其邊而飾之也 — to 缘 is to run along the border and trim it. That is the character's second life. 陶渊明 opens 桃花源记 by putting a fisherman on a stream — 缘溪行，忘路之远近, he went along the stream and lost track of how far he had come. 孟子, declining to flatter 齐宣王, tells him that pursuing what he wants by his current methods is 缘木而求鱼, going up a tree after fish. In both, 缘 has stopped being a thing and become a way of moving: alongside. Neither use points at destiny or at anything like it. The word is describing contact — one line held against another for a stretch, and then not.

Two further steps carried it to where a modern reader meets it. The first was grammatical: what you travel along is also what accounts for where you end up, so 缘 came to mean because. 苏轼 wrote the most quoted instance of it on a monastery wall in 1084 — 只缘身在此山中, only because I am inside this mountain. The second was Buddhist. Translators working on the doctrine of dependent arising needed a pair of terms, and took 因 for the seed and 缘 for everything that has to run alongside the seed — soil, rain, light, the season — before it becomes anything at all; 因缘 has been the standard compound ever since. 段玉裁 traces that step himself, in the same note: 緣之義引申爲因緣、夤緣 — the sense of 缘 extends outward into 因缘, and into 夤缘 (yín yuán), climbing by attaching yourself to something. Three destinations, one edge. 缘分 is the last of the family to arrive, and its second half is what limits it. 分 is a portion, an allotted share. What two people are said to have is a quantity of alongside-ness, and quantities get counted after the fact.

The best-known story about 缘 is not a love story. It is about a man who tried to have his wife killed. 李复言's 《续玄怪录》, written in the ninth century, sends a young man named 韦固 to 宋城, where he finds an old man reading by moonlight with a sack at his side. The sack holds red cords. The old man explains that the cords tie the ankles of two people who will marry however far apart they are born, and that 韦固's is already tied — to the three-year-old daughter, so he says, of an old woman selling vegetables in the market. Insulted, 韦固 sends a servant to stab the child. Fourteen years later he marries the adopted daughter of a prefect; she is beautiful, and she wears a flower ornament between her brows that she never takes off, because there is a scar underneath it. The magistrate who heard the story renamed the inn 定婚店, the Inn Where Marriages Are Settled, and the old man became 月下老人, the Old Man Under the Moon, whose shrines still stand in Hangzhou and Taipei with requests for a red cord left at them. The shape of the story is worth more than its machinery: nobody in it can act on the information. 韦固 is told his 缘 in advance, and the telling changes nothing except the scar.

In ordinary speech the word can be worked at but not claimed. 广结善缘 — form good connections widely — is an instruction, and it asks for conditions rather than for a verdict. A monk on his alms round is not said to beg; the verb is 化缘, which treats what the householder hands over as a connection formed rather than a payment made. 随缘 — go with whatever the conditions turn out to be — is what a person says when they have decided to stop forcing something. And the phrase that shows the limit best is 有缘无分: the meeting happened, and nothing followed. A word that meant fate could not say that sentence, because it concedes half of an outcome and withholds the other half. Even the parting formula runs the same way. Two people who cannot schedule a next meeting say 有缘再见, which sounds like a promise and is not one — it hands the whole question over to whatever turns out, later, to have been the case.