Sembah (, , ) is an Indonesian greeting and gesture of respect and reverence performed by clasping the palms together solemnly in a prayer-like fashion, placing them in front of the chest and, while bowing slightly, moving the pressed palms up to either the chin, or until the thumbs touch the tip of their nose, depending on the status of the person greeted.
Sembah (, , ) is an Indonesian greeting and gesture of respect and reverence performed by clasping the palms together solemnly in a prayer-like fashion, placing them in front of the chest and, while bowing slightly, moving the pressed palms up to either the chin, or until the thumbs touch the tip of their nose, depending on the status of the person greeted.
Sembah is endemic and prevalent in Nusantara regional cultures sharing dharmic heritage—such as Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese. It is cognate to the Cambodian sampeah and Thai wai. All of these greetings are based on the Indian Añjali Mudrā used in namasté.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).