The elusive concept of `inyon`
Hungbo`s Gourd
by Gary Rector
Korea Herald
April 12, 2001

I'm not sure that this is really a good title, because "inyon" is such a common term in Korean that it hardly seems elusive in a Korean context. But it's one of those peculiar terms (and such terms are found in all languages) that can't be adequately translated by a single word or phrase in a language of a different cultural sphere. When I'm faced with the task of translating Korean text that contains this word into English, I always feel dissatisfied with the result. I'm forced to settle for some term such as "affinity" or "connection" or "relationship" even though I know those words do not fully cover the semantic territory of "inyon."

Koreans use "inyon" so much that once you get used to speaking Korean you wonder how you ever got along without this concept all those years. In response to such a statement as "I have nothing in common with that guy, but I keep running into him wherever I go," an English speaker is likely to say something like "It's just a coincidence" or "Hmmm, maybe he's following you around" or even nothing at all. A Korean would probably say, "Maybe there's some inyon between you." In a case like this, we might think of it as meaning "karmic connection." While that isn't really a perfect translation, either, it does hint at the fact that "inyon" is originally derived from Buddhist philosophy. (Don't get the wrong idea. Everybody uses it, Buddhist or not.)

In its strictly Buddhist meaning "inyon" is a combination of "in," meaning cause, and "yon," meaning they way things are, which we might also call conditions. "In" is something that accounts for something else in a direct way, while "yon" provides indirect causes and circumstances. Take a rice plant, for instance. The seed that was planted to produce it would be its "in." Its "yon" would be the farmer's efforts at cultivating it, the weather, and so on.

You can see from that definition that absolutely everything (except perhaps the Prime Mover) involves inyon and that tracing all the causes and conditions of any particular item or event would eventually lead you to connections to just about everything else in the universe. It is said that if your sleeve even brushes lightly against the sleeve of another person on the street, it is the result of inyon going back 100 million kalpas. And that brings us to inyon's connection with Buddhist concepts of time.

A kalpa, called "kop" in Korean (sounds almost like "cup"), is an incredibly long time. It is the time it takes for one cycle of the creation and destruction of a physical universe. In our terms, that would be the time from the Big Bang to the present and on to that unknown future when our universe is destroyed in the Big Crunch or succumbs to Utterly Complete Entropy. The idea is that, for those two people to pass on the street so their sleeves could brush each other, there had to be all the right circumstances to get them there, including not only a reason to go to that particular place but also being born at the right time to the right parents. Of course, there also had to be all the right atoms and molecules available to make those particular bodies and those particular clothes with those particular sleeves! And the availability of those atoms depended on stars burning their hydrogen fuel, thus turning it into heavier elements, and exploding in a supernova blast to spray out stardust in all directions that could be used to form the next generation of stars, and so on, ad infinitum.

On the other end of the time scale we have ksana, which Koreans call "challa." It has been said that a ksana is one-ninetieth of the time it takes to have the briefest of thoughts, and yet within each ksana, hundreds and hundreds of inyon-generating events are taking place.

Since everything that happens is accounted for by its own unique and inconceivably complex inyon, every event is in some sense both miraculously improbable and inevitable at the same time.

Once the concept is grasped, it's easy to see why Koreans so commonly call on inyon to explain synchronistic events and relationships, but it's also hard to see why in the West we don't have a corresponding term in common use. I suppose that's just inyon, too.