I see your Aeschylan harpies

And raise you LOVELY OPERA HARPIES

迦陵頻伽
ka.ryou.bin.ga

Literally: “ka” (this character is only used phonetically) – imperial tomb – repeatedly – attend

Alternately: A beautiful voice, or a person (especially a woman) who possesses one. This phrase refers to the kalavinka, a bird (with the upper body of a woman) said to dwell in the “pure land” plane of existence, where it sings and preaches Buddhist teachings with an incredibly beautiful voice.

Notes: Don’t pay any attention to the literal meaning of the characters; as the note on the first character suggests, this phrase is an entirely phonetic rendition, based on Sanskrit. As such, a number of replacements are possible, including switching the 迦 and the 伽, or replacing 頻 with 嚬 or 毘.

The term comes to us from a philosophical commentary on the Mahayana sutra, known as the Mahayana-sutra-alamkara (in Japanese 大乗荘厳経論, Daijoushougonkyouron).

KaRyouBinGa

This is apparently a t-shirt design.

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
This entry was posted in Japanese, Yojijukugo and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s