- Choose An Antique Singing Bowl
Many of you will confuse the quality of Tibetan Singing Bowls, but don’t know how to Choose An Antique Singing Bowl. To help with your selection, we have added some information to help educate you on the differences between Tibetan Singing Bowls.
The antique singing bowls we carry in our store date back 100 to 400 years from the 17th to 19th century. Unfortunately the art and perfection of making these bowls was lost when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1949. Contemporary singing bowls have been made within the last 10 years. Artisans today have so far not been able to reproduce the quality of sound one gets from an antique singing bowl. Although some artisans are getting better at the process, contemporary bowls tend to not have the same richness of tones as antique bowls. Also, selecting an antique bowl does not necessarily ensure quality of tone. This is because most bowls are out of tune and there is no way to retune a bowl since the tuning process occurs when they are forged. Unfortunately many antique bowls have become out of tune due to factors such as hundreds of years of use, exposure to radical temperatures, and altitude changes when brought down from the Himalayas to lower altitudes.
Superior quality bowls are determined by a bowl’s harmonic balance. Both our antique and contemporary bowls have been hand selected by Rain Gray, a Tibetan Singing Bowls expert and musicologist. He uses strict quality standards to check for criteria such as harmony, balance, volume, smoothness and playing ease. Rain will check hundreds of bowls until he finds the one or two that pass his standards.
This bronze meditation instrument is hand-hammered and hand-finished of pure bronze in a centuries-old Tibetan tradition believed to date back to the pre-Buddhist 10th to 12th centuries.
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