Metal Singing Bowls (Himalayan Singing Bowls)

Tibetan or Himalayan - Mystique and History

• A credible consensus regarding their origins is difficult to find. There is no hard evidence that the sound bowls are ancient—and even less that they are Tibetan. If Tibetan singing bowls are not a Tibetan creation, what are they and where did they come from?
• The bowls’ popularity, as well as their reputation for healing through vibrations, surged in the early 1990s. Around the same time, international interest in Tibet increased, and the bowls’ supposed origins in the Land of Snows granted them a mystique and material value they otherwise might not have possessed.
• Several books dedicated to the subject of using sound bowls for healing have been published since the early 1990s. Their opening pages offer a wide variety of origin stories, attributing them to “tantric shamans,” “shamanic lamas,” “the Zen of Tibet,” “spirit helpers,” “pre-Buddhist Bon faith,” and “ngakpas,” a type of empowered, non-monastic practitioner. The bowls are said to date back to the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, but have been hidden as a “native” secret. Some claim the sound bowls were part of an oral tradition that only became exposed when the Chinese army invaded in the 1950s. While these origin myths vary, they share a number of themes. The stories are shrouded in mystery and secrecy; are transmitted orally and therefore lack a written record; invoke the supernatural, and spirits are sometimes involved; often are attributed to groups, such as Bon or ngakpa, who are considered fringe and have a reputation for being misunderstood; and only recently became available after being displaced from their traditional context. This fits in with the way inaccurate portrayals of Tibet have proliferated for decades. As the scholar Donald Lopez, Jr., wrote in his Prisoners of Shangri-La, Tibet is depicted as being “from an eternal classical age, set high in a Himalayan keep outside time and history” and “embodies the spiritual and ancient.”
• But the true origin of the “Tibetan singing bowls” may only date back to the 1970s. Sound bowls first appeared in the written record in 1972, when the American musicians Nancy Hennings and Henry Wolff released their album Tibetan Bells. The New Age album used an array of percussion instruments to generate minimalist soundscapes of various long-held tones. The primary musical instrument used in their work—the sound bowl—cannot be conclusively demonstrated to come from Tibet.
• There is a long tradition of using musical instruments in religious life in Tibet. These instruments have been comprehensively catalogued by scholars, as have many of the rituals in which they appear. In his pioneering Tibetan Ritual Music: A General Survey with Special Reference to the Mindroling Tradition, Daniel A. Scheidegger catalogs 12 major instruments and 36 minor variations. Several of these are bells and chimes; none of the instruments catalogued are sound bowls, or anything which could become or be mistaken with a “bowl” shape. There is, however, a class of bowls in Japan called rin that, when struck with a wooden stick, produce a sound reminiscent of the mass-marketed Tibetan singing bowls. Rin are also kept on a small cushion similar to the one which is associated with Tibetan bowls, and the traditional wooden striker is often covered in a felt tip, identical to the kind sold with Tibetan singing bowls. A Google image search for “rin” will result in a mix of sound bowls variously labeled “Tibetan singing bowls” or “Rin singing bowls.” Perhaps Hennings and Wolff acquired a rin and mistakenly labeled it as Tibetan? Or perhaps they were incorrectly told it was Tibetan? Regardless, it appears that neither they nor their fans sought to verify this claim, instead capitalizing on the power that the word Tibet has to conjure up the image of a far-off, mysterious land of magic and mysticism—a power that was particularly relevant to their time.

Some Preference Choices

Buffed vs Antique Look

Cast or Hammered

Flat or Round Bottom

Himalayan or Japanese Style