Hunting for the perfect singing bowl
Have you ever heard people telling you “When you meet the right one, you will just know” or “When the disciple is ready, the master will appear”? I’ve always found these advices mildly irritating at best, and downright condescending at worst. Not being especially concerned with the search for the right partner or a guru, I believed myself safe from such perfunctory statements. Apparently I wasn’t, as I soon discovered when I started my hunt for a singing bowl.
My friend Suzanne had just come back from our rainy afternoon in McLeod Ganj - one of the strangest Indian names I’ve heard so far - with a long story of shopping which included her purchase of three Tibetan bowls, or singing bowls, two small ones for her boys and a relatively big one for herself. Dharamshala, in the north of India, the smaller village of McLeod Ganj and most rural hamlets in the valley play host to numerous Tibetan refugees, Buddhist monks and sympathisers. McLeod Ganj indeed is also the place of residence of the Dalai Lama, whose temple is the only place so far where I’ve had to pass my small backpack through a metal detector, understandably so.
My experience with singing bowls until then had been limited to a few - and far between - sound healings and to my very thoughtful selection of the best bell ringing sound to signal the end of my silent meditation on Insight Timer. During the last sound healing done in Rishikesh just a week or so prior, I remember noticing in particular a deeper bell that was played around my head as I was laying down, covered in my three blankets. It’d been uncharacteristically cold and I would not move out of my room without a scarf and a newly bought cashmere blanket, at a minimum. In the relaxed and slow frame of mind I was in after the healing session, which often puts me into a quasi-sleeping state, I thought to myself I would quite like to buy a singing bowl just like the one I so liked. Suzanne’s recounting of her quest to find singing bowls made me realise that, what better place to find Tibetan singing bowls than the place that hosts the largest gathering of Tibetans outside of Tibet?
With my - at the time and still now - quite limited understanding of this topic, I would honestly admit that this is an oversimplification, of both the science and art of singing bowls, and the actual reality of their production and supply lines, as the majority of bowls are produced in Nepal, Bhutan and Ladhak (which also host a significant number of Tibetan refugees).
Even conveniently forgetting all this complexity, the process of trying out different bowls in different shops and getting the advices and explanations of the shopkeepers is sufficiently overwhelming. My first contact, Aqib, a thin, big-eyed Muslim guy that keeps his shop in pristine conditions, told me that there are two types of bowls: the ones made in India, with an alloy of seven metals, and the ones made by Tibetan monks, that are not only handmade but count on nine metals. Sibilla, an Italian girl I met randomly while looking for a warmer room to move into (fruitless search) that specialises on voice-therapy and sound, told me that bowls go by weight, that handmade and laser-made are visible to the untrained eye too, and that, although we often refer to Tibetan singing bowls, most bowls are made outside of Tibet. Which, without meandering into geopolitical considerations, makes perfect sense to me. Omar, the flirty shopkeeper who I got to meet while Aqib was cleaning his shop, told me nothing about seven or nine metals, and also seemed not to give a lot of thought to this Indian-Tibetan distinction. On the other hand, he whipped out his phone and used it to measure the note (or notes) produced by the bowl vibrations and went on to talk about how long the sound lasts, if it’s stable or oscillating. Handmade or laser-carved seemed to still be a consideration, however I’ll admit that I don’t find it very easy to distinguish them, as Sibilla and Omar claimed.
Omar and Aqib are part of a small but significant community of Muslims based in McLeod Ganj. To my understanding most of them are businessmen and have shops disseminated among what passes for the main road here, an uneven expanse of loose bricks made of concrete where small taxis and motorcycles speed and honk their horns and pedestrians are constantly in danger of being run over or pushed into any of the numerous roadside puddles. At least there’s much less cow poop than in the streets of Rishikesh. Aqib tells me they usually open at 9am but, as it was the 12th day of Ramadan and they have to fast and pray, their opening time was pushed forward to 10am. When I observed that I hadn’t seen any mosque around, he told me that they made one out of a private room close by, for which all the 200 or so Muslims of McLeod Ganj contribute to pay the rent.
On my hunt for the prefect Tibetan singing bowl, I decided to keep my analytical and rational mind at bay and try to let my instinct take the leading role in the choice, following what Suzanne told me: “Let the bowl choose you”. The first day Aqib took out at least one third of the bowls in his collection and, not only no bowl chose me, but by the end of it I was also mildly nauseated. I made an appointment to come back the day after, with a clear mind and ear. The second day of my hunt for the perfect bowl, Aqib was still washing the floor of his shop. While I can’t say to have visited all the shops in McLeod Ganj, the difference in cleanliness of the windows and floors of the ones owned by these young Muslim shopkeepers really stands out compared to many other dusty collections of bric-a-brac.
While waiting for Aqib to finish, I got to be invited by Omar into his shop. I got out only 2 hours later, convinced that, while I still didn’t understand how I was supposed to evaluate singing bowls, the ones Omar showed me were indeed different from most of the ones I had seen in other shops. To my untrained ear, the sounds resonated for longer and felt in some way more alive. On a separate but still relevant note (pun not intended), the artwork on them was also pretty unique.
On my third day I was utterly exhausted by this bowl hunting, and decided that I had heard enough sounds to last me a lifetime. I even sent some recorded sound tracks back home so that my parents could pick a bowl as well. I decided to go for a quite simple, rustic bowl, that I remembered liking from the start. The last step of the process was the bargaining. India being India, that’s a separate topic altogether. Thankfully by that time I had spent a sufficient amount of time chatting with Omar and the process was blissfully concluded relatively quickly. I bought for myself a Ladakhi bowl with hand-carved patterns that look like cave paintings, and a black one with a Buddha incision in the inner rim for my parents (the entire extended family was involved in that selection and I believe that, in typical Italian fashion, even my mum’s hairdresser was consulted on the topic). Omar promised to have them shipped after the weekend and I went off to have some lunch, rather starving after the entire ordeal.
Most cafes and restaurant in towns everywhere with a significant transit of travellers have a public bookshelf: which book do you think stared glaringly at me as soon as I entered the Tibetan Tea House? A book on Himalayan singing bowls, whose width rivals The Lord of the Rings! I opened the book and got more and more horrified to read about frequencies for the specific chakras, musical scales, bowls production methods, photos of vibration spectrums… Ecco! (Loosely translated from Italian as “that’s it”, “I knew it”). I should have done more research! I don’t even know which chakra, if any, vibrates when i sound the bowl! Only a hot ginger lemon honey tea could keep my anxiety at bay.
In the past week I concluded a three-day sound healing course focused on Himalayan singing bowls. I now understand a bit more about frequencies, chakras and musical scales so that when I went to buy a set of 7 singing bowls (much less elaborate than my previous purchases, I have to admit), I definitely looked the part, with my very own tuner app and testing different types of strokes and mallets of different softness. The Ladhaki singing bowl however, which at the time of speaking safely reached my home back in Italy, holds a special place in my heart (and in my ears).
I’m finding that, as with everything, there is no right or wrong reason to buy a bowl and each reason is equally valid. Suzanne bought the singing bowls for her boys because she believes it’s important for children to grow surrounded by musical instruments and to interact actively with sounds. Another friend, for the whopping price of less than 5$, brought back to Taiwan potentially the smallest, cheapest, least handmade bowl that could be found in McLeod Ganj. Looking at the tradition, many monks back in Tibet used singing bowls to help in their meditations and would strike the same bowl over and over and over again. What’s with one bowl for each chakra and all this musical theory nonsense! Even the beautiful-sounding crystal bowls many sound healers use nowadays are a very recent American invention. As for me, while having a mental compass my second time around buying singing bowls gave me much more confidence, the thing I’m most happy about is actually that I managed to follow my instincts and buy any bowl at all, when I still didn’t have any clue about what I was even supposed to do with them!
On a side note…
You are all very warmly invited to my (coming soon) sound bath sessions back in Italy!
