My very limited and distant understanding is that "luck" in a Southeast Asian, or at least East Asian, context has a little bit of a different spin than the Western half-conscious conception of an amorphous, impersonal force of favorable fortune. It'd be a little more like having various functionaries in a celestial bureaucracy pulling for you. Or maybe having the spirits who are administering your life and circumstances be more likely to be favorably disposed toward you. Or maybe having everything in the right order, such that things like prosperity and happiness would naturally tend to result as part of that order.
Perhaps these concepts could be adapted. The general sense seems to be that luck is a feature of a relationship. Although things capable of providing luck by a relationship are presumably also capable of having opinions or preferences about why not to confer what a human might consider "luck" under some select circumstances.
The idea of "right order" is related to Taoist practice especially, but is also similar to religious practice in general: one hears of miracles happing around a dedicated saint or mystic without them necessarily even having been themselves aware that there was a problem for a miracle to solve. Also the Egyptian deity Ma'at is a direct personification of one version of "right order", and Neoplatonism involves the sometimes-related idea of Logos.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Re: Changing luck
Date: 2023-07-04 02:55 am (UTC)Perhaps these concepts could be adapted. The general sense seems to be that luck is a feature of a relationship. Although things capable of providing luck by a relationship are presumably also capable of having opinions or preferences about why not to confer what a human might consider "luck" under some select circumstances.
The idea of "right order" is related to Taoist practice especially, but is also similar to religious practice in general: one hears of miracles happing around a dedicated saint or mystic without them necessarily even having been themselves aware that there was a problem for a miracle to solve. Also the Egyptian deity Ma'at is a direct personification of one version of "right order", and Neoplatonism involves the sometimes-related idea of Logos.