"Yuanfen” to me is good karma. Without it, nothing happens. Without enough of it, relationship do not last long. There are ripple effects from karma, it lingers before it dies.
I have used the term that “Books and I have "yuanfen”, because books have taught me so much and brought me so much joy”.
命 is closer to fate. But it has to do with karma also. You last life’s behavior had set the motion for this life. I tell my old man that he must have owed me a lot from past life, that in this life, he treats me so well. But, I better be good to him this life because I don’t want to wait on him next life. (I cannot stand the way some Taiwanese women serve their man like a slave, gross)
I am a Christian but this rebirth concept is so in grain in our thoughts, it is really hard to shake it off. I just look at the positive side. Good energy brings good energy, good karma begets good karma.
I don’t think the word “Fate” is exclusive to circumstances between people, whereas Yuan Fen is. I can say it’s the fate of that asteroid to land on your house, but it’d be pretty awkward to use Yuan Fen in that case. To me, Yuan Fen implies interaction between people’s personalities.
So in a broader perspective, I would consider how I grew up and learned how to behave: imitation. My first source of mimicry is my parents. I learned to get angry and to worry about irrelevant things, heh. So maybe later on I’d watch a lot of Hollywood movies which resulted in me acting like a bad-ass regardless of the appropriateness of the situation. So finally, boy-meets-girl and I’d try to show off by acting like a troubled, raging lunatic. Not good. Anyway, I was probably attracted to personality traits that I was missing, which might have been being down-to-earth and skeptical. So after my interaction with her, I was able to adjust and be a little more balanced.
The Chinese mindset is one where the world is a chaotic sea of personalities clashing and shaping each other. In that sense, a person’s path in life determines his personality, what he’ll be attracted to, and ultimately his future (AKA Yuan Fen). To me, it’s not superstition – it’s very real. But as a man, I am constantly training to be stronger mentally and physically so that emotional chaos, or the “tides of fate”, will have little affect on my well-being. So maybe some fortune teller says a car will hit me next week, but instead in my world, I was just bit by a mosquito. Oh well.