I have a friend very near the end of his days – so near he’s past the doctors and into hospice care.  This friend has a lifetime of involvement with Tibetan Buddhism and is spending his remaining time focused on his practice, sort of shining up his mind to best be able to engage with the great transition.  He’s also, of course, dealing with the pain, weakness and loss of functioning that comes as the body goes through the final shut down.

I’ve visited with him in the meditation hut behind his house in the mountains a couple of times.  Sometimes I bring singing bowls.  Our time can be short, based on his stamina.  One time I brought a Lingham bowl and, though he heard it just once, he felt like it brought a clarification of a teaching to him.  Another  singing bowl, a very special large Jambati, really appealed to him so I left it, a loaner.

When I came back the next week there he was sitting up with the singing bowl right next to him.  He said he’d been ringing it all week and then he told this story.  One sunny afternoon he had the doors to his hut open (these are Dutch double doors) and he was sitting on his couch ringing the singing bowl and meditating.  These two sparrows flew in the hut and one landed on his foot and the other his hand.  He sat there in his meditation, not moving (Tibetan style meditation is generally eyes open) and the bird on his foot flew up and landed on the rim of the singing bowl.  Then the two birds lifted off and flew out of the hut.

without ever hearing about germ theory

In Nepal I was told that people liked to use copper and brass utensils for their healthful qualities.  What these exact qualities consisted of was not made explicit but faith in the concept was strong.  People believed that food stored in brass was rendered more potent somehow.  Well, it turns out that faith and folklore were solidly grounded in empirical evidence.

With the increase in resistant bacteria and the incidence of infection in hospitals there have been a number of recent studies in Japan, the United States and Europe of the bacteriological performance of different surfaces.  It turns out that both plastic and seemingly sterile stainless steel are surfaces on which bacteria, including MRSA and the deadly E-coli 157 can live for long periods of time.  Surprisingly, the best performing surface was copper (well nobody included arsenic surfaces which would probably really do the job).  One study showed E-coli living on stainless steel for 34 days while surviving only 4 hours on copper.  Brass, which is mostly copper with a bit of zinc also performed admirably.  You may well begin seeing brass table tops, food preparation tables and unvarnished brass doorknobs popping up as functional features in institutional settings.  The VA is currently doing a field test to the idea in one of its hospitals.

In Tibet Jambati bowls holding water over time would have the ability to vastly reduce the amount of pathogens in the water while Manipuri bowls in the kitchen would help with food safety in that setting.  The idea that copper and brass were especially healthy is also a part of European folklore.  So the existence of millions of brass bowls in the Himalayas is really not that hard to understand.  How some of these bowls come to sing so beautifully, well, that remains a mystery.

I went to see a presentation by a practitioner of Tibetan sound healing.  He was a Nepali man, very sincere, who was practicing what he called a dying art in his native country. In the course of his discussion he spoke of many instances where people had experienced healing through hearing the tones of his bowls – even in hospital settings.  It seemed to me that it wasn’t just the bowls but the presence of the practitioner that facilitated whatever healing might have taken place.

His bowl set consisted of about 30 new bowls, some machine made and some beaten, which were labeled by note and chakra.  These were the kind of better quality new bowls one would see in most of the shops in Kathmandu.  He arrayed the bowls by tone and played specific arrangements of frequencies, sometimes repetitively (as one might do in a meditation).  Listening, as I did, with the trained ear of a bowl professional I was aware of the missing and flat elements in the sounds. Even in the hands of an experienced and skilled player these new bowls lack the subtle qualities I find most appealing in singing bowls. This is not to say listening was a bad experience.  Quite to the contrary, a proper spell was cast and people seemed to really enjoy it, yours truly included.  Still I couldn’t help thinking just how much better the presentation would have been with a full set of sweet and well balanced ancient instruments.

During Q&A afterwards I asked him about his experience of brass bowls as a kid in Nepal. He said he only remembered eating out of them, and never knew anything about their sounds.  Only when he got older and began to deeply explore his country’s ancient traditions did he meet a teacher who could initiate him into the mysteries.

A very interesting study by Cornell University entomologists involved in developing non-chemical methods of mosquito control caught my ear this week.  In a paper published in the February issue of Science magazine it was reported that sonic resonance is the key to inducing female mosquitoes to mate. The way it works is this.  Male mosquitoes tend to flap their wings between 550 and 650 times per second while female’s wings move more slowly, generally between 350 and 450 beats a second. When you’re hearing the annoying buzz of a mosquito it is the movement of their wings that generates the sound, which comes in somewhere between 350 and 650 Hz.

What I found most fascinating is that the resonance sought by the mosquitoes is not a simple matching of frequencies, the male slowing down and the female speeding up until they both buzz somewhere in the middle, say at 500 Hz.  Instead they both shoot to hit the next mutual overtone above 400 and 600 Hz which is around 1200 Hz. The male slows down or speeds up so that his wings beat exactly two times for every three of hers. When he gets it just right the convergence of the two frequencies produces the high pitched overtone.  Only when the female hears the sweet spot in their mutual sonic field does she allow mating to happen.

What this says to me is that the pleasure one experiences from resonance and overtones is very deep in our DNA.  There is something absolutely primal operating when one listens to profound sounds.

Wow you see the darndest things.  This was on the door of a home in Kathmandu.  I just had to snap a photo.