I think you might be laboring under a false assumption - maybe thinking of Zen meditation?, which is only one type and not the most popular - many more kinds of meditation require mental and emotional practices to direct energy and build your astral body… there’s a lot more to meditation than this. In styles, modalities and purposes.
There was a conversation about that here recently:
If you spend the amount of time practicing cultivating qi as you did chanting on only words, you would get more benefits. If you did both at the same time and used vibrating (not just saying, vibrating) the words to help you mentally direct your ever and breathe in more, you’d do even better.