Gǎnyìng or yìng is a Chinese cultural keyword meaning a "correlative resonance" pulsating throughout the purported force field of qi that infuses the cosmos.
When the idea of ganying first appeared in Chinese classics from the late Warring States period (475-221 BCE), it referred to a cosmological principle of "stimulus and response" between things of the same kind, analogous with vibratory sympathetic resonance.
[1] In the modern period, Chinese ganying "stimulus and response" was used to translate some Western scientific loanwords (such as diàncí gǎnyìng 電磁感應 "electromagnetic induction").
[2] Several early texts (below) use an interchangeable synonym of ying < Old Chinese *[q](r)əәŋ 應 "respond; resonate" : dòng < *[Cəә-m-]tˤoŋʔ 動 "move; shake; set in motion".
The earliest records of ganying are in Chinese classics from the late Warring States period (475-221 BCE), when the "Hundred Schools of Thought" developed competing philosophical doctrines, including correlative resonance.
[15] Le Blanc says the roots for the "key notion" of resonance can be traced back to the older strata of the Yijing, citing an early saying preserved in Hexagram 1 Qian 乾's line interpretation.
(27.38)[20] The Xunzi uses ganying "joint resonance" to explain the harmonious connection between a person's xing 性 "inborn nature" and jing 精 "essence; senses".
The ancient Chinese view that anomalies in the heavens, disturbances on earth, earthquakes, avalanches, sightings of unusual animals, and other such "wonders" (怪) were omens of the king's behavior has been termed "phenomenalism" by Western sinologists.
The Chunqiu Fanlu "Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals", which is attributed to the Confucianist Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) but compiled later, describes how humans are in a system of relationships with the cosmos, and elevates the notion of resonance to "a full-fledged cosmological theory".
"[36] Liu An's (c. 139 BCE) Huainanzi "Masters of Huainan" is second only to the writings of Dong Zhongshu (see Chunqiu fanlu below) as a source for sympathetic-resonance theory in the Han period.
The yángsuì 陽燧 "burning-mirror (which concentrates sunlight to ignite tinder)" is yang, round, and sun-like; the fāngzhū 方諸 "moon-mirror (used to collect dew by condensation)" is yin, square, and moon-like.
(6.2)[47] Another Chapter 6 passage illustrates how resonance is in harmony with the Dao, and admits that even someone with "enlightened understanding" cannot explain the mysterious forces of magnetism, optics, enzymes, and heliotropism.
Although Wang Liang 王良 and Zaofu 造父 were famously skillful equestrians, Qian Qie 鉗且 and Da Bing 大丙 controlled their horses through mutual resonance – a simile for how a sage ruler should be attuned to his people.
[49] In ancient times, when Wang Liang and Zaofu went driving, [as soon as] they mounted their chariots and took hold of the reins, the horses set themselves in order and wanted to work together.
The argument there propounded, that these relations should be based on non-action (wu-wei) understood as resonance (kan-ying), draws its ultimate strength from the cosmological scheme outlined above.
The phrase itself means "stimulus" (gan 感) and "response" (ying 應), which is how we have translated it when the Huainanzi refers specifically to the discrete component processes that the term denotes.
[55] Wang Chong's (c. 80 CE) Lunheng "Discourse Balance" uses ganying once to criticize prognostications from the Fengjia 風家 "School of Wind".
After Dan escaped from being held hostage by Qin, he sent Jing Ke to assassinate the King, but Heaven miraculously used ganying to save him from death.
[64] As an example of how the Chinese notion of sympathetic resonance was both powerful enough and malleable enough to lend itself to a variety of Buddhist hermeneutical tasks, Sharf says Guifeng Zongmi employed it in his account of Chan patriarchal succession: Bodhidharma came from the west only in order to transmit the mind dharma.
[3] The Buddhist monk Lokaksema's (179 CE) Chinese Banzhou sanmei jing 般舟三昧經 translation of the Pratyutpanna Samādhi Sūtra uses the indigenous notion of ganying "sympathetic resonance" to explain the interaction between the practitioner or supplicant and the grace of buddha or bodhisattva being invoked.
The (early 5th century) Shishuo Xinyu "A New Account of the Tales of the World" says, Yin Chung-k'an once asked the monk Hui-yuan, "What is the substance of the Book of Changes?"
[67]The (5th century) Hou Hanshu biography of Fan Ying 樊英[68] likewise records that during the reign of Emperor Shun of Han (r. 126-144 CE), there was a disaster at the Min Mountains in Shu (modern Sichuan).
Sharf explains ganying resonance as the mechanism through which categorically related but spatially distant phenomena interact, as a mode of seemingly spontaneous response (although not in the sense of "uncaused") natural in a holistic universe of pattern and interdependent order.
For example, the Dasheng Xuanlun 大乘玄論 "Treatise on the Mystery of the Mahāyāna" by Zhizang 智藏 (458-522) explains ganying, Stimulus-response is the great tenet of the buddha-dharma, the essential teaching of the many sutras.
[73] The Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論 or Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana makes no distinction between the two, with the yingshen "response body" being the Buddha of the 32 signs who revealed himself to the earthly disciples.
[74] "The sage, bodhisattva, or buddha, through the principle of nonaction, becomes at one with the universe, acquires the attributes of stillness and harmonious balance, and, without any premeditation or will of his own, spontaneously responds to the stimuli of the world around him, manifesting bodies wherever and whenever the need arises."
[38] The British sinologist Angus Charles Graham says the Chinese "correlative cosmology" concepts of gan and ying occupy the same place in Song philosophy as causation in the West.
The related term baoying 报應 "moral retribution" originated from Buddhist doctrines of karma and reincarnation, and became a fundamental principle of Chinese popular religious belief and practice.
It specifically referred to the principle of "tit-for-tat moral retribution", based upon the belief that one's good and evil deeds will result in corresponding rewards and punishments, typically manifest as the lengthening or shortening of one's life.
[78] The (c. 12th century) anonymous Song dynasty compilation Taishang ganying pian 太上感應篇 "Folios of the Most High on Retribution" was the classic in the shanshu genre, and one of the most widely circulated Daoist works in late imperial China.