In Kathmandu’s tourist district of Thamel sits a planned outdoor shopping area called Mandala Street. Nearly every morning—around when the foreigner-friendly coffee shop Himalayan Java opens its doors—a man blows his conch shell loudly from a second-story walkway. He typically wears flowing white robes and a large turban with a peacock feather stuck in its folds, and sports a beard and mustache curled into near-perfect circles. He is a self-described “sound-bowl healer” who offers to align chakras with specially tuned metal bowls, a technique, he will tell you, that is practiced by an ancient lineage of yogis. The staff of Himalayan Java are suspicious of his sound bowl healings, but some of the visitors are spellbound by him, the picture of the Orientalized South Asian holy man, and a few find their way to his healing table each day during the peak tourist seasons.
These sound bowls, or “Tibetan singing bowls” as they are frequently called, have become nearly ubiquitous in Buddhist contexts in North America and Europe. They are used in mindfulness practices, yoga studios, and even some newer Buddhist rituals, yet 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.
The dubious claims of the bowls’ Tibetan origins have not escaped the notice of the Tibetan community in North America. A handful of blog entries by Tibetan writers in North America have appeared questioning the pedigree of the allegedly “Tibetan” bowls, and as recently as February 18, an op-ed piece by Tenzin Dheden of the Canada Tibet Committee ran in the Toronto Star entitled “‘Tibetan singing bowls’ are not Tibetan. Sincerely, a Tibetan person.” The piece garnered attention on Facebook with one commenter noting, “I’ve always wondered why Injis [foreigners/non-Tibetans] are so fond of these bowls. In the past, I’ve asked a number of Tibetans, including monks, and none of them had heard about [them].”
No comments:
Post a Comment