Ganying

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. Early schools of Chinese philosophy adapted ganying into different folk theories of causality, such as universal resonance influencing all interrelated things in Daoism, and ethical resonance between Heaven and humans in Confucianism.

Ganying resonance was later used to mean miraculous "moral retribution" in Chinese folk religion, and the resonance between the power of the Buddha and the individual practitioner in Chinese Buddhism, especially in Pure Land Buddhism. In Japanese Buddhism, the term kannō 感應 was used for the same idea.^[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").