How to Choose a Singing Bowl
Tuning in to which Tibetan singing bowl to buy involves some self-discovery, a bit of education, and a journey into the wide range of choices available.
The best way to choose an antique singing bowl, really, is to fall in love with the sound. That feeling is a measure of your affinity with the vibrations coming out of the instrument. There are many different sounds available in the high quality singing bowls for sale on this website and you may find you have a preference for tones in a specific range. That is the self-discovery part, feeling the resonance between you and a bowl’s soundscape.
There is more than a bit of education available on this website. You may find it helpful to start on the Tibetan singing bowls page where the singing bowl essentials are discussed. The singing bowl types page provides an overview of all the different styles, sizes and shapes along with the range of tones for each. In that most essential area, sound, Best Singing Bowls has you covered. All the singing bowls for sale here have been selected for the quality of their sound and internal harmony. Singing bowls range over five octaves so you have quite a bit of choice high to low.
Along with the sound you are going to get a unique beautiful looking object. Do you want a small or large singing bowl, one with an ancient patina or a bright cleaned surface? Some antique singing bowls have inscriptions or extensive markings. Virtually all the bowls have some amount of incuse (carved in) workmanship. Bowls can be well-worn or crisp.
Selecting Your Singing Bowl
If you dive right into our selection of singing bowls for sale please take advantage of all the filtering and sorting tools we have. They are designed to allow you to narrow or widen your focus. Especially helpful is narrowing your choices down by choosing a singing bowl Octave (how deep or high is the main tone) type, size, and price. There are many more filters as well if you have a specialized interest. Once you filter at the top of the page is the sort box. You can display bowls by tone, size, and price among other choices. The default display is a bit of a random walk.
Don’t get fooled by all the pictures being about the same size – a big Jambati singing bowl can be 10X the size and weight of a tiny Manipuri. Our high quality sound clips are very good at conveying the full range of sounds in each singing bowl. We do no sound processing or digital enhancement, just straight up recordings. You can be confident the Tibetan singing bowl you receive will sound exactly the way you hear it on the clip.
Each bowl has a Details page with more information, photos, and a second sound clip. That second clip is with a ringing stick, teasing out individual tones. I have been surprised how some of my customers have been able to use the sound clips to discern that a bowl has a special resonance with another already in their sets.
Use our Features to Keep Track of Your Choices
It is really important to keep track of the numbers of the bowls you like. The easiest way to do this is to hit the COMPARE button. This way your choices are recorded. With compare you can play bowls side by side. More importantly you can email yourself the compare list which will have a link in it so you can go back to your choices at a later time.
Let Us Choose For You
Maybe you don’t want to do the deep dive into dozens of singing bowls. When you order our specials we take care of the selection. You can guide us a bit by sending a note with the order.
Maybe you’ve looked and aren’t sure or haven’t found exactly the right bowl. Please contact us! We have great success matching bowls and people. Check out some of the comments on how to pick and choose Tibetan singing bowls from our customers
First of all what is a hoard. Think of a secret stash of valuable objects. As a kid I was fascinated by old coin hoards. In 2013 the largest hoard of gold coins ever found in the US was discovered in the Sierra foothills. Fascinating story, and you can imagine my delight when I came across a similar hoard of old singing bowls in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Once the most common singing bowl, The antique Manipuri style has almost left the scene. The original Manipuri style came from Tibet. Those exquisite bowls, first available in the 70s, helped ignite interest in singing bowls. There was no way the trickle of Tibetan bowls was going to be able to satisfy the kind of demand that eventually emerged. Fortunately vast quantities, millions of bowls, were sitting on the shelves in homes all over Nepal and a sliver of north east India.
At first Nepal carried the load. Kathmandu in the mid 90s was awash in antique Manipuri bowls. People sold them on the streets, in shops and at the open air markets. There were no fakes or new bowls – why try to revive a lost art when you could buy a bowl from a villager for a dollar.
As singing bowls became a hot commodity Indian exporters entered the scene in a big way. The exporters were metal dealers, used to buying and selling by the kilo. They had handled bowls as a small part of their mix for years. A few saw the opportunity and invested big time in collecting. By the early 2000’s one exporter was sending over 100,000 bowls a year out of the country. A 2007 article in the UK Guardian newspaper featured a reporter visiting this exporter in Delhi. At the time the exporter had an inventory of 12,000 singing bowls, all antiques gathered from the countryside of India. Based on the size ratios of the time the weight of these bowls was likely 8 Metric tons, 8,000 kilos or almost 20,000 Lbs. The reporter bought a single bowl that weighed 11.2 kilos – 25 Lbs!
It is unlikely anyone will see 12,000 antique Manipuri bowls gathered in one place ever again, let alone huge ones. The countrysides in Nepal and India have been scoured. Despite the dealers offering ever higher prices they are coming back with a bag full instead of the truckloads of days past.
That brings us to the hoard. One dealer, with whom we have had a decades long relationship, decided to collect as many Manipuri as he could. His plan was to hold on to the best and sell off the others so he would have a large group of high quality bowls – to sell at the right time. Over the course of a couple of years, buying primarily in India, he said he purchased about 20,000 bowls selling the lower quality ones to have the cash to buy more.
Then in 2018 the time had come – and Best Singing Bowls was offered the first look at the hoard. Relationships (and ready cash) count in this world. The buyer had winnowed it down to about 5,000 bowls. They were just a wonder to see, tall stacks some bowls gleaming, others dark with patina. It took days to ring each bowl and ring them again then physically examine each one. In the end a deal was struck and we left with over 1000, the finest of the hoard.
We will be listing these bowls on the website over the next couple of years.However if you are in the market for a Manipuri set there is no better time than now when we have this incredibly deep stock. No better place to start.
#singingbowls #Manipuri #antique #Himalayas
A report published March 17 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine showed that aerosols of the Corona virus were shorter lived on Copper, only 4-8 hours, than on any other surface tested. It was longest lived on hard plastic and steel surfaces (3 days) while on cardboard it has a one day life.
Copper is the main metal in singing bowls. Antiques are generally between 75% and 80%. Our website has a section on the healing properties of copper including testing in hospital settings by the Veteran’s Administration and Sloan Kettering. Apparently the pathogen killing properties of copper extends to viruses as well.
This does NOT mean, of course, that a singing bowl is a preventative or cure for the virus. What it does mean is out of the box you can be pretty confident your singing bowl has no trace of it.
#antiviral #copper #singingbowls #covid19 #coronavirus
OBITUARIES | Eric Newman, Whose Coins Told of America’s History, Dies at 106
I remember seeing this guy’s name in the coin magazines I was reading in the 60s. Kind of amazing – born in 1911, started collecting in 1918. Imagine what his pocket change looked like! The photo of him at the top of the article at 103 shows he must have been doing something right.
Those coin magazines really made an impression on me. Now I am in the business of selling an analog of coins – antique copper bowls. Just like in the old days I get to pick through stacks and get the best ones – except I’m somewhere around the Himalayan mountains while doing so. My ear has augmented my eye in terms of selecting value. Like back then I’m building my own personal collection and at the same time passing on lots of great ones.
I’ve adapted the style they used in those magazines to sell individual coins – a nice photo along with a story, possibly a little romance and the essential immutable facts. Being the web I have more space than a magazine and get to add multiple photos and sound clips along with lots more info out of my database.
I’ve even adapted one of the core values in numismatics – “condition” which I call “state of preservation” and use it to assess every singing bowl. No other singing bowl website seems to look at their bowls this way let alone judges them to a standard, record it and post it for each one. I’m even issuing certificates with photos, again something that harkens back to the coin world.
Coin collecting is not a part of the culture now. Just like Newman, I got started by a coin gift at age 7 and just like him I hung out at a coin store – and I was not the only kid who showed up there.
I have scattered a few whimsical coin collecting references around the site including here and here.
RS
The order was for one #118 mallet, our cutest dinkiest [wool-head] traditional Nepalese mallet, together with two cover cloths, one royal blue with gold “Profound Sounds” embroidering, one velvet, Tibetan monk red, also with the gold “Profound Sounds” embroidering. It all fits neatly in a USPS Small Flat Rate box. Very pleasing.
Now I will tell you what this packing/visual evoked for me.
Post-earthquake Kathmandu 2015
We did not have these plush red velvet cover cloths until last year. We were in Kathmandu in late Fall 2015, our first sojourn there since the massive earthquake that Spring. In one way, the city looked to us much the same as before. But that’s only because Kathmandu always has part-built buildings, unfinished or not begun sidewalks, piles of rubble waiting for a family crew of adults (often with even their small children alongside as fellow laborers) to start building. This means the devastation is not exactly discernible, until you step in close. We, for instance, were brought to a different abode than is our usual receiving place. The 4-story home that we have arrived into multiple times, now so compromised with fissures that a full crew of extended community was attempting to salvage it. That was the first dramatic reality.
No fuel, no cars; clean air
The second was the fuel embargo that was being imposed on Nepal from India due to contentious new Nepalese Constitution. This was unofficial (no formal admission by Indian government) but very real and starting to bite at the local level. During the weeks we were in Kathmandu we were immersed in the milieu of fast-dwindling gas supplies, with private cars the first to be rationed and ultimately denied refueling.
The silver lining for us in this state of affairs was that the ever-present polluted air of the city cleared. It was breathtaking and we were breathing, crystalline Himalayan air! We could see the awesome mountain range that had never been visible in all the years we had been coming. We rented bicycles, an unprecedented joy, suddenly very appealing because we were not taking our lives into our hands. The roads were empty, the air was clean.
The Nepali embroiderer
And then there was the embroiderer from the village, for whom I had a warm place in my heart since he had in a previous trip, exquisitely embroidered Toothless (How To Train Your Dragon) on a t-shirt for my granddaughter.
The embroiderer walks from village to city every morning to sit at his sewing machine and embroider incredible intricacies of design. His mastery is awesome to witness and the earthquake severely impacted every Kathmandu artisan (international tourist trade way down for fear of more quakes).
So I had the thought that he could embroider a whole batch of new cover cloths for us.
It almost seemed that it couldn’t happen when he told me sadly that they were unable to receive any of their usual supplies of fabric due to earthquake-related losses in suppliers and manufacturers and access..;
“But you know…”, he pondered, “we do have something right here, if you think it could work…”
And thus Best Singing Bowls was blessed with one sweet batch of Tibetan-red velvet cover cloths to mark an historic moment in Nepalese history.
Oh, and he embroidered this one-off delight just for us.
Corrina McFarlane, BSB
The website is now packed with new articles and information, organized for easy navigation. The overview page provides a bird’s eye view of our broad range of singing bowls ringers, mats and accessories. In keeping with the best of modern web design, the site now fills the screen – bowls look just spectacular on a big monitor or TV. It is also optimized for the small screen.
It can be overwhelming to see hundreds of amazing singing bowls. To soothe the overstimulated mind we’ve developed a world class set of navigation tools. It’s easy to narrow down what is on the screen to see just what you are most interested in. The right hand column (or the filter icon in mobile) on our Bowls page has the most extensive system for filtering singing bowls anywhere.
The filtering system is also designed to be a teaching tool. Want to know how frequencies and notes relate – play with the filters. Looking for low or high notes, filter for them and see what kinds of bowls show up. Want to see bowls that are thick, have extensive artwork or are ceremonial antiques – just use the filters.
Favorite customer photo!
Such cute things show up in the inbox
Displayed on end-cap in Santa Cruz, CA, in the original Staff of Life Natural Food Store. Besides these select few, which happened one holiday season at the express request of the store buyer, every now and again through the years a singing bowl has gone to its new home/owner in one of these special hand-made drawstring pouches; the fabric and lining carefully selected for the person, fitted to the request or occasion.
This one’s velour with floral cotton lining
Another Manipuri and ringing stick goes home in a bag
Every one will be adopted
Corrina takes a very special big Lingham bowl out and sits with it on the river levee at dawn – just her, her bicycle and the singing bowl. Two black crows are flying overhead and they come down and land on the bike path not more than ten feet away. She keeps ringing the singing bowl and they stomp around a bit, cocking their heads but not making a sound. Sort of unusual behavior for crows. And then they are off. Corrina said these were the same two crows that visited James in the Rainbow Garden 10 miles away. He had been ringing this same bowl just days before.
I‘m in the internet shop in a side alley, one of the good ones with instant backup power for when the electricity goes down. All of a sudden lots of noise and yelling on the main street. Then some loud bangs and people run past the door. The shop guys jump up, go outside and pull down one of the two metal doors over the windows. Moving fast they pull in their sign, potted plants and even their floor mats. Then down comes the other door and we’re locked in, a half a dozen Westerners and 20 glowing LCD screens behind industrial strength steel roll up doors like you’d see on a loading dock. You can hear the chanting, loud voices and honking horns muffled thru the steel. Hey I’m glad I’m in here not out there. Some patrons didn’t look up from their Skype video calls; I guess they’ve seen it all before. It’s actually quite cozy so I go back to my Google spreadsheet.
I stayed on my spreadsheet till they closed the shop. Brand new law is 10:30 PM closing for all stores and bars in Kathmandu. There went the all night partying…
Fortunately I knew a back way through an alley and skipped the worst street. When I emerged I saw a contingent of soldiers, all in their uniforms but no guns showing. Still the street was unsettled, people seemed upset and there was a lot of trash. I thought the rickshaws looked a bit exposed so I waited till I saw some Westerners walking my way and fell in. They split at the next corner so I tried a cab but he didn’t understand me, or maybe he couldn’t hear me over the din. I wasn’t sure about that mode of transport anyway considering the gridlock plus the hotel was less than half a mile. I stood there till I saw two guys with backpacks like mine going my way. So we became three but they didn’t know it, I just trailed behind them figuring safety in numbers. They got me to my corner which is on a street with a gate and a guard. Once through the gate I could feel the tension lift.
I’m sure when I go down the same streets in the morning you wouldn’t know anything had happened the night before.
We arrive at the yoga studio in the late afternoon darkness. It is so quiet and orderly in there, the floor gleams – a tabula rasa for my layout. I need 100 square feet for the singing bowls. First I lay down yoga mats two deep, soft but not too squishy. On top of the mats go heavy woolen blankets and on top of that various devices to put the singing bowls at different heights. Out come the singing bowls and cover cloths. I sort them into groups and sequences. I’m laying them out musically but also with an eye to instruction. I want to talk about the different types, how they might have been used and demonstrate different qualities.
An hour goes by and a pleasing arrangement emerges with the singing bowls laid in lines, curves, and little groups. There are places to walk among the singing bowls both for me during the concert and for people when they get their chances to wander among them later. We’ve put the trimmed and edged antique carpet squares under all the smaller singing bowls. The garnish is the dozen colorful mallets and ringing sticks matched for the type of sound I want to bring out from groups of singing bowls.
People start to come in. They get to admire, even touch the singing bowls but not ring them. Afterwards they get to fully play. Finally I greet the crowd and ring a large resonant singing bowl once to bring people to attention and end the last strains of conversation. I begin my talk as usual with no notes, just a mind full of ideas and nowhere near enough time to express them all. It is nice to have a hundred square foot stage to meander in. The room’s acoustics are just great, I need to project, not shout. I introduce myself, tell stories and do show and tell. After about half an hour I ring the big singing bowl again very gently. Then I start my concert.
