How to understand the kanji 縁 (en) — a knot in the thread of fate that connects us, or binds us

Analysis of the kanji 縁 (en): the character’s structure, its etymology from “the hem of a garment,” the evolution of meanings, and its linguistic forms. “En” as a tool for emotional regulation, relational agency, and cultural practices.

Not “I,” but a web of relationships

There are meetings that look like coincidence only because we cannot see the threads that led us to them. Japan has one short word for this, written with a single kanji: 縁 (en) — and, at the same time, an entire, deep way of seeing relationships: not as a set of private choices, but as a network of events into which a human being is drawn, bound, sometimes saved, sometimes choked. In today’s text we will get to know this one character — 縁 (en) — beginning with its structure and etymology, and then, slowly, we will descend deeper and deeper — into the history, psychology, and philosophy hidden in its lines.

Because 縁 “en” does not begin in the heavens at all, even though we sometimes want to understand it as destiny. Today’s 縁 is the Japanese shinjitai (after the 1946 reform), and its older form 緣 reveals a fuller internal logic: on the left 糸 — thread, fiber, the technology of tying; on the right 彖, a phonetic element which, in classical explanation, carries sound, but also leaves in the imagination an unexpectedly bodily image — for a concept we associate with fate. And when we go back to “Shuowen Jiezi,” one of the oldest etymological dictionaries from the 2nd century CE, we find a definition surprisingly down-to-earth: 「緣，衣純也。從糸，彖聲」 — “the hem of a garment; built from thread, with a phonetic element.” Metaphysics will therefore begin today with tailoring, because an “edge” is a boundary, a point of contact, and a guiding line.

Only later do we go deeper: into language, psychology, and philosophy. We will show how, from “binding tape,” there grows the motion of “along the edge” (縁に沿って), then grip and rescue (縁にすがる), and further “occasion” and the “favorable moment” (機縁) — all the way to an existential vision of our being, where meetings cease to be “incidents” and become events in a network for which — even though we did not create it ourselves — we bear co-responsibility. We will also look into research on how “en” truly sits in people’s minds — as a tool for regulating emotions and taming uncertainty. The character 縁 (en) teaches something mature: you do not choose all the threads that come to you — but you do choose which of them will become a strong knot, and which must be cut.

How the character 縁 (en) is constructed

Let us begin with something a bit technical, yet crucial: the Japanese 縁 is a shinjitai form (reformed after 1946, simplified kanji), and its older counterpart (kyūjitai) looked like this: 緣 (and it is this older form that best reveals the historical logic of meaning). Although the simplification touches primarily the right side of the character, it does not change the main idea: on the left there still stands thread (糸), and on the right there still remains the element that historically carries sound and an image leading toward the meaning of “entanglement.” In other words: even when the script becomes more economical, the character still tells the same story — about something that ties, pulls, connects, and “sets” a meeting along an invisible thread.

If, however, we want to see what truly “worked” inside this kanji, we have to go back to the oldest etymological dictionaries. “Shuowen Jiezi” (說文解字: the earliest great etymological dictionary of Chinese characters, written at the turn of the 1st/2nd century CE during the Han dynasty) gives a definition which at first sounds surprisingly mundane:

「緣，衣純也。從糸，彖聲」

“緣 is the binding/hem of a garment; it is built from 糸, and 彖 is the phonetic element.”

This is the moment when the reader usually misfires: they expect metaphysics and receive… tailoring. Yet that “tailoring” is a brilliant beginning of metaphysics, because a hem is not only the edge of fabric, but also the notion of boundary, contour, a place of contact — precisely where relationships are born. Xu Xinping and Huang Guangguo, analyzing the character in a historical-cultural context, spell this out literally: 糸 in ancient commentary is “thin fiber,” “a bundle of threads,” written like a sheaf of tied strands; and 彖 in classical explanation is… a pig (豕). And now, pay attention, because here lies an image you cannot “unsee”!

In their reconstruction, the pig 彖 (Chinese Tuàn, Japanese tan) is not a dead “phonetic,” but a mini-icon: the upper element 彑 looks like the outline of a head, the lower 豕 resembles the torso, bristles, legs, and tail. When you place 糸 to the left of this “pig,” you get a construction as concrete as rural everyday life: thread as a rope with which an animal is tied. From here it is only a step to the most important shift in sense: from “binding tape” and “edge” to the meanings of “being tethered,” “being connected,” “bond,” “dependence.” This is not a romantic metaphor — it is mechanics: something is tied to something, so it ceases to be entirely “free” and begins to exist in relation. And when later we say:

これは縁だね

“this (meeting) wasn’t accidental,”

that is, “it had en in it” (“kore wa en da ne”), in the background precisely that primitive, bodily image is at work: someone tied a pig with a rope — someone “tied” someone else by circumstances.

It is also worth seeing how broadly this “thread” radiates across the whole family of characters with the thread radical (糸, or, when placed on the left in its abbreviated form: 糸→ 糹/⺰).

Thread 糸 (ito / shi) most often does not mean an abstract “little thread” from a fairy tale, but a very concrete world of silk, cocoons, craft, and weaving, and even (surprisingly) strong connections with dyeing and color. This materiality matters: before the “thread of fate” becomes philosophy, it is first technology — something that is twisted, tightened, interlaced, unbraided, dyed, stitched, something that can snap or be cut. And that is precisely why characters with 糸 so naturally carry in language meanings of tying and untying (結), tangling (絡), bonds (絆), continuity (続), or connection — because their “raw material” is the world of real threads, real weaves, and real tension.

At this stage we are still before the “philosophy of meetings” — and that is good. Because if we leap straight into stories about destiny, we will lose the most Japanese trait of this concept: en does not start in the heavens, but in the hand. In binding tape on clothing, in a bundle of threads, in a rope on an animal, in a weave that holds. Only from this physical concreteness does the subtle world later grow: relationships, “fate,” conditions, responsibility, and the question of whether we are truly the “authors” of our lives — or rather co-authors in a network woven as we go.

The “binding tape” of fate

In the almost two-thousand-year-old “Shuowen Jiezi” already mentioned, 緣 (en) does not begin as “fate” or “love.” It begins as “衣純” (Chinese yī chún) — literally the hem, the finishing, the binding tape of clothing: that narrow zone of fabric which is simultaneously the last line of order and the first line of contact with the world. This word matters, because it immediately sets the optics: “en” is born on the boundary. Not in the center of things, not in the “essence,” but on the edge: where something ends and something else begins, where surfaces touch, where something can be stitched on, sewn on, reinforced, or broken.

And now something interesting happens: from something as simple as an “edge” an entire fan of meanings begins to grow in Japanese culture, because an “edge” is not only a place, but also a direction of movement. If you walk along the bank of a river — you walk “on the boundary.” If you touch the edge of a robe — you touch a guiding line.

Notice how this mechanism forms a logical chain — and how each time the same protagonist stands in the background: 縁 (en). First, 縁 (en) is literally an “edge”: something along which one can move (縁に沿って en ni sotte — “along the edge”). Then the “edge” begins to act like a verb, because it offers a grip: 縁にすがる “en ni sugaru” means “to cling, to seek support, to hold onto something desperately” — as if that edge were the only handhold. And when “grip” appears, “support” appears too in an existential sense: 縁を頼みとする “en o tanomi to suru” — “to make en your support,” to lean on a bond, on circumstances, on what connects us to someone.

And only from this dynamics — movement along the edge → grip → support — is born today’s most “human” field of meaning: cause and opportunity, that is, something that leads to an event. In Japanese this is beautifully visible in words where 縁 (en) no longer means the edge of a thing, but a “hook” in the course of life: 縁で en de (“because of / thanks to this connection”), 縁あって en atte (“by a turn of circumstances; it worked out so”), ご縁があって “goen ga atte” (“because it so happened, because we had en”).

And when that “opportunity” has the flavor of time — of something happening exactly on cue, as if in precisely the right moment — Japanese naturally reaches for 機縁 (kien): “an opportunity, a favorable coincidence of circumstances.” In this sense 縁 (en) is no longer binding tape, nor merely relation: it becomes a mechanism of guidance — what makes it possible for something to happen at all.

Important: this is not an arbitrary list of “different meanings,” but an evolution of one intuition. Researchers who have conducted a solid review of corpora and classical texts can gather around a dozen historical semantic fields of 緣: from binding tape and ornaments on the edge of clothing, through the rim of a vessel, all the way to wrapping, entwining, encircling, climbing, following along, adapting oneself, relying on, connecting/entanglement, opportunity, and even a strictly grammatical function (prepositional expressions).

This last point is especially important in the living language: 緣 (en) is not a “dead noun” like “threads of destiny” — in linguistic tradition it can be mobile: it can function as a noun, a verb, and even a prepositional element (“along,” “through,” “relying on”), which reveals its nature: this is a dynamic concept. It describes not a state, but a happening: holding on, being guided along, interweaving, hitting the right timing, the appearance of opportunity.

And here, only here, comes the moment when the “binding tape” begins to “be metaphysical” — without any trick. Because an edge has yet another quiet property: it reminds us of limitation. An edge is always a boundary: something has its rim, its measure, its end.

In linguistic studies* it is said that from 辺縁 (hen’en) there is born not only “along” and “to encircle,” but also the sense “I do / I do not have the right, the chance, the fate for this” — what later crystallizes in the language in words like “有縁／無縁” (uen/muen — “it was given to me / it was not given to me”). From this one binding tape, an entire emotional register grows: from the simple “I walk along the river” to the bitter “it is not my time / such is my fate / I have no right to that (en).”

*See above all: 白川静, “字通” (Heibonsha, 1996) — in the entry “緣/縁” Shirakawa leads the reader from the original sense “衣純（へり）” (hem/binding tape) through meanings “along the edge,” “to cling,” “to rely on,” up to today’s “connection / opportunity / en”.
See also: 網野善彦, “無縁・公界・楽—日本中世の自由と平和（増補）” (Heibonsha, expanded edition) — a classic book on medieval Japan which shows how the pair 有縁／無縁 functioned not as a poetic metaphor, but as a real distinction: “you belong, therefore you have a place and rights” vs. “you have no bonds, therefore you are outside the order.”

“En” does not begin as a mysterious external force. It begins as a line of contact and a way of moving along that line. First there is an edge. Then there is movement “along the edge.” Then there is holding on, support, “getting somewhere” thanks to something. And only at the end — only truly at the end — is born what today we call a “non-accidental meeting”: a situation in which life seems to lead us along an invisible edge, exactly where our “I want” meets what nevertheless happens “through something,” “thanks to something,” “along something.”

Going deeper — 緣 (en) and psychology

In everyday Japanese (and, more broadly, in a culture that “thinks relationally”), 緣 “en” works a little like a quiet device for lowering tension. Instead of brooding for hours over the question “why didn’t it work?”, a person can close a sentence with a simple formula: ご縁がなかった (goen ga nakatta) — “it was not given to us / there was no en.” This is not a magical spell. Psychologically it is reframing: a change of interpretive frame that allows one to break rumination and regain breath. In research on “en” it is described directly as an element of everyday language that is used to cope with difficulties and has real adaptive potential (in the sense that it helps people “survive” social tensions without immediate escalation).

The crucial point, however, is that “en” is not one emotion or one belief, but an entire package of associations. In a large empirical material (based on associations and colloquial language), it can be grasped that this concept organizes experience in three great domains: relationships, randomness/“fate” understood as the course of circumstances, and religiosity.

That empirical material is a specific study. It was conducted by Hsin-Ping Hsu (徐欣萍) and Kwang-Kuo Hwang (黃光國), and published in 2013 in the “Bulletin of Educational Psychology” (教育心理學報), volume 45.

They took 310 students from two universities (mean age 20.9), gave them a sheet with 24 empty boxes, and asked for 3 minutes of free associations to a stimulus written as a single character: 「緣」 (en); importantly, after each word the participant had to return their gaze to the character “緣,” to limit the “chain effect” (so that associations would not run word-to-word, but would keep rebounding from the stimulus).

They collected 3051 verbal reactions; after merging repetitions, 1171 unique words remained, an average of 9.9 words per person.

Because the material was enormous, they applied a clever quantitative filter: “Bradford’s Law” in a “zone analysis” version — they divided the words into 3 zones with a similar number of total responses, and found that the “core” was only 24 words appearing ≥ 20 times, the “semi-core” was 149 words (3–19 times), and the “long tail” was as many as 998 words (1–2 times); the proportions of unique words aligned close to the pattern 1 : 6.2 : 41.6.

Next, for further analysis they took only the first two zones (173 words in total), because they gave good representativeness: less than 15% of the vocabulary already generated about 2/3 of all responses.

They added one more important psychological detail: they counted not only “what” appears, but also “how fast” — therefore (in line with AGA practice) they relied on the first 14 responses and used position weighting (earlier associations receive higher weight as closer to the central representation of the concept). Thanks to this they could draw a map of how 緣 (en) “sits in the mind” as a category of everyday life, not merely as a pretty word.

And here one can immediately see what people understand when they see the character 縁 (en): alongside “love,” “breakup,” “happiness,” “gratitude,” there appear whole strings like 有縁／無縁 (“there is / there is no en”), 随縁 (a life stance of “following what arranges itself”), 惜縁 (caring for a bond), 結縁 (tying a bond), and right beside them — religious vocabulary: 因果, 因縁, 縁起縁滅, “temple,” “sutras,” “past and present lives,” and even very concrete figures from the religious-folk landscape, like 月下老人 — “the old man under the moon,” associated with pairing couples (so, again, love).

That “en” organizes relationships above all makes sense, because relationships are psychologically the most uncertain part of life. You do not control the other person. You do not control the moment of meeting. You do not control what will “click” in someone. And precisely here “en” does something very clever: it provides a language that simultaneously acknowledges the reality of bonds and accepts the limits of agency. In the research material, “relationships” are by far the heaviest, most weighty part of the semantic field of “en” — much more than any other categories.

This explains why, in practice, “en” is spoken of as often about a partner as about a mentor at work, a friend, a client, and even about a “meeting” with a place or an object: because it is the same psychological mechanism — inserting an event into a web of relations, instead of treating it as chaotic coincidence.

The second domain — let us call it “randomness” — is especially interesting, because it is not about simple “destiny.” In research, experiences of “en” are distinguished into those which a person sees as hard to explain (then the feeling arises that “it was as if destined”) and those that can be explained “normally,” rationally (then the attitude dominates: “all right, we’ll see, let it arrange itself”). Importantly, these two types of “en” have different consequences for behavior — in the first variant people more often declare long-term engagement and active overcoming of obstacles; in the second they tend more toward “going with the flow” and greater passivity.

This is psychologically very sober: “en” does not always soothe in the same way. Sometimes it soothes because it gives meaning (“it was strong, it means something”), and sometimes it soothes because it reduces pressure (“I don’t have to force this shut; I will let it unfold by itself”).

And here we come to a very Japanese nuance: the difference between resignation and wise acceptance. In models describing “en,” one speaks of two tracks of psychological work: the “認命” (ninmei — a resigning-fatal stance: “so it must be”) and the “知命” (chimei — an understanding stance: “I know there are limits, but within those limits I can act”). The first track can be an “en” mechanism — something that quickly removes pain, but can lead to helplessness. The second track is more “mature”: it acknowledges circumstances and at the same time activates action, gratitude, effort, and responsibility.

Psychologically, the concept of how “en” operates is powerful: if you truly feel that relationality is primary and fundamental, then meetings cease to be “incidents” and become events in a network for which — though you did not create it yourself — you bear co-responsibility.

One last important reservation: “en” also has a shadow, “its demons.” There are (of course) also bad bonds (“凶縁”, “孽縁”), and in a relational culture the very act of “cutting” a relationship can be a source of strong fear. In other words: a tool that calms can also bind — especially when a person cannot distinguish “caring for a bond” from “remaining in something that destroys.” This is one of those things that may surprise a reader raised in a more individualistic culture, like the European one. Here, severing a bond may be linguistically and emotionally less costly (which does not mean it is easy). Sometimes it is obvious that a relationship is destructive.

縁 (en) — philosophically

If we take 縁 (en) seriously — not as a romantic ornament, but as a keyword to how experience arises — then the Western intuition cracks: “first there is the self, then relationships.” In the perspective strongly emphasized by Buddhist texts (and later by the philosophy of the Kyoto School), it is the other way around: relationality is primary, and the “self” and the “thing” emerge only as the result of an event-relation. Kosuke Shimizu (professor of international relations at Ryukoku University in Kyoto), writing about engi (縁起), says it directly: it is not that two ready-made beings enter into a relationship — rather, the “occurrence of relation” constructs subject and object. And if that is so, agency does not consist in a monolithic “I” steering the world, but in the ability to respond to what “happens in-between” — and to take co-responsibility for the weave into which I enter (but of which I am not the sole maker).

To feel this, we need one more word: 而今. Read in this tradition as nikon (sometimes also jikon or shikin), it means a “now” different from ordinary “present time on the calendar.” This “now” is rather the place of an event: a moment in which time and space are interwoven, and relation is neither a replay of the past nor the execution of a plan, but real becoming. In Shimizu and Noro’s view, nikon is even the opposite of a “safe” temporality that wants predictability: linear (control of the future) or cyclical (the return of the same). Nikon is risk — but also the possibility of a “new beginning,” because it is precisely there that new arrangements of engi, new 縁 (en), can “spring up.”

And here enters Nishida Kitarō (a 20th-century Japanese philosopher) and his thought on observation. Shimizu invokes his example of “seeing a flower”: in the moment of an authentic act of seeing, there is not yet a hard division between “me” and “flower.” There is only seeing — an event of relation. Only after a moment do language and habit draw boundaries: “I saw” and “it was a flower.” But in the very center of nikon, in the very act, “I” and “thing” are not ready-made blocks; they are rather crystallization from a relational act. This is a strong, technical thought — and at the same time surprisingly accessible, because everyone knows the moment when looking (or listening, or touch) is so intense that the “I” falls silent for a second.

Now the most interesting part: the same direction of thinking can be described linguistically as “being-in-entanglement.” In English-language literature on the reception of Heidegger in Asia, there appears a controversial yet inspiring discussion about rendering the German Dasein (“there-being”) with the term 緣在 (“being as en”: being opened through a weave of circumstances, relations, conditions).

緣 (en) carries at once several layers that are not visible in a simple “here”: entanglement and connection, the conditionality of arising, limitation, as well as the dimension of “area/place” and “time” (including the sense of “occasion” and “timing”). And even if we do not buy this proposal as the “best translation,” as a tool for better understanding it is good: it allows us to say plainly that 縁 (en) is not a romantic category, but an existential one — it concerns how we are “here” at all, always already in the world, among others, in conditions we did not choose.

From this follows an “other agency” — very practical, not mysticism at all. If relation precedes being, then responsibility does not consist in total control (“I choose everything”), but in something harder: in the quality of response. I can pretend I am not in the web, and then the web will pull me anyway — only blindly. Or I can see that 縁 (en) happens (sometimes like a gift, sometimes like a burden), and then my agency consists in whether I can, in nikon (而今 — the act of presence in the present): recognize conditions, not harm the “other,” not make “en” an alibi for passivity — and consciously “weave myself in” so as not to poison the network of threads. In this sense, “en” is not a story about “accidental meetings,” but about a mature ethics of relation: the world is not a stage for my “I,” but a fabric of events — and I am one of the knots that can tear that fabric or tie it more wisely.

Returning to the ground

Once you see that in the very character 縁 (en) there sits thread (糸) and guidance along an edge (the old intuition “衣純”), it becomes hard to read Japanese stories “in the European way” — as a series of private choices by protagonists. In classical literature, a meeting is rarely mere coincidence; more often it is a knot: something that “ties itself,” and from that moment begins to hold. This gesture of tying has its own metaphysics in language: 結び (musubi) is not only a “knot,” but also “making something become,” “closure and beginning.” That is why in old tales — from court narratives to collections of anecdotes and Buddhist stories — human relations are often described as something that has weight and its own logic: sometimes it blesses, sometimes it suffocates, sometimes it demands repayment. In this sense, “plot” is simply a version of the character 縁 (en) unfolded over time: someone meets someone, the thread catches, and then we no longer watch “pure freedom,” but a weave.

Theatre makes this even stronger, because Japanese theatre loves the tension between what a person wants and what “carries them.” In nō, kabuki, or bunraku, relationships are very rarely purely romantic: more often they carry the weight of dependence, debt, obligation, unfulfillment, karmic return. There “en” can be like a rope: sometimes it saves, sometimes it hangs. And that is why it is so easy to carry this motif into contemporary stories — film and anime — where a “meeting” stops being an interesting coincidence and becomes a theme of responsibility.

In "Your Name" ("Kimi no Na wa"), the word 結び (musubi) is virtually spoken philosophy: the thread of time and relation binds people beyond their plan, but does not release them from deciding what to do with that weave. Similarly, in stories where a relation is “strange” (between a human and spirits, between the living and a memory, between someone “here” and someone “no longer”), “en” works as a tool to describe something deeper than flirtation: it describes why certain meetings cannot be “clicked away” like notifications.

Even better, the logic of “en” can be seen in "Final Fantasy VII," only there the thread is not romantic, but painful and heavy like a ship’s rope. Cloud and Tifa do not “choose” their own history — it already exists as a knot: the childhood promise on the water tower in Nibelheim returns years later not as sentiment, but as an obligation that holds them together in the moment of catastrophe; and when Cloud collapses psychologically, it is precisely Tifa — as a living “knot of memory” — who descends with him into the Lifestream, where their relationship becomes a tool for reconstructing the “self” (here “en” works very literally: the “I” emerges from a network of memories, others’ gazes, and shared facts).

Meanwhile, the meeting with Aerith has that kind of “en” which is granted “from above” and irrevocable: she is not only a beloved, nor a “quest-giver,” but a knot connecting the party with the Planet’s memory, with Cetra, with Holy, and with the fact that certain decisions are responsibility toward the world, not a private choice; her death does not close the relationship, because in the order of FFVII bonds do not end with biology — they return as an echo in the Lifestream, as a “presence” in events that happen later.

And on the dark pole we have Sephiroth and “Reunion”: here “en” takes the form of toxic entanglement — the shared infusion of Jenova cells makes different people “pulled” toward one center as if on a string; it is not metaphor, but a brutal image of how “thread” can be seized and turned into a mechanism of compulsion. In sum, FFVII speaks of the same thing as our character 縁 (en). Without powdering it: meetings can be beautiful, but the web is real, heavy, and often unjust — and maturity does not lie in denying that we are entangled, but in deciding how we will act within that weave: whether we will repeat the violence of the thread, or try to untangle it.

We have gone from binding tape to fate — and there was no mystical leap, only a series of logical shifts. Edge (衣純) becomes a line of contact; the line of contact becomes movement “along”; movement “along” becomes “holding on” and “support”; and “support” becomes a shared language of relationship, meaning, and responsibility. That is why “en” works so well in culture: because it is both a word and a tool. Perhaps the most mature version of the Japanese lesson of 縁 “en” sounds like this: “you do not choose all the threads of fate — but you do choose which of them will become a knot.”

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