shomyo means A type of Buddhist liturgical chant. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 100 out of 100.
Why this word is great
SHOMYO — [Noun] A rigorous, syllabic style of Buddhist liturgical chant, a sonic architecture of devotion practiced in Japanese Tendai and Shingon sects. Its name is a learned borrowing from Japanese 声明 (shōmyō), itself from Middle Chinese, ultimately a translation of Sanskrit śabdavidyā ("the science of sounds or words"). Unlike the worldly sentiment of enka or the temporal authority of a daimyo, shōmyō is a discipline of sacred phonetics, a metaphysical technology of vibration. It is the low, tectonic drone grounding a single pitch; the precise, granular syllabification of scripture elongated into a river of tone; the palpable resonance felt in the sternum more than heard by the ear—a momentary stay against the silence that predates and will outlast all names.
noun
- A type of Buddhist liturgical chant.“Since shōmyō began as the chanting of Buddhist texts in India and went from there to China before coming to Japan, it is now sung in three different languages. Those songs sung in the ancient Indian dialect are called bonsan […], those in Chinese are called kansan, and the songs in Japanese are wasan. Because the Japanese adopted Chinese ideographs for their written language, giving them Japanese ”