How I Discovered a 1,000 Year Secret Part of Human History

How much can you learn from one singing bowl? In the case of this one unassuming bowl I collected around 1999, I learned a lot. Over the years, I examined thousands of bowls to piece together the history of singing bowls but it is surprising to ponder how much I learned from this one bowl early in my career.

I traveled to a dozen countries to uncover the heritage of singing bowls, unearthing the various cultural connections stretching across all of Asia. I worked with world class scientists to discover the secrets of singing bowl construction, which was the real key to knowing their origin (as I discuss in The Singing Bowl Book). I spent 25 years examining every type of antique singing bowl to really understand their power, beauty and legacy.

However, one bowl taught me more than most. It was one of the first dozen singing bowls I collected and this one bowl started me on this long journey 25 years ago. You have probably seen this bowl many times because I took a photo with it back in 2010 (below). It has always been one of my favorites and is one of the oldest and best bowls in the collection. More importantly, this one bowl led me down the path of discovery.

When I found this special bowl, it changed my ideas and got me extremely curious about singing bowl history, a curiosity strong enough to get me on international flights to travel halfway around the world. This bowl was my first proof of the longer history of singing bowls. It was different from the other dozen or so I had collected up until that point. It looked different, felt different and sounded different. Green and brown in color, it was the first bowl I saw with very dark oxidation.

The color got me to visit the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, which I frequented often as a member. I went upstairs to look deeply at bronze, getting close to the glass to look as closely as I could. I focused on the few older pieces with very dark color, all at least 400 years old. While younger bronze develops color, the deep, dark, earthy coloration like that found on this bowl requires more time. The closest thing I could find in the museum were Japanese bronzes from the 16th century, including a finely made handbell, which had that deep, dense color only found in very old bronze. However, the Japanese bronze had a different color, ranging from chocolate brown to black. My bowl was unmistakably greenish-brown. Chinese bronze had a similar color. I found examples of bells, vessels and statues over 1,000 years old which were similarly green but showed a much heavier crust of oxidation. Over a very long time, crust builds up on the surface of the metal and this process was just beginning on the inside of my bowl. I concluded it could be around 800 years old based on the color and oxidation pattern alone.

It was an early attempt to pinpoint the age of the singing bowls. By comparing them to other bronze objects, I was putting them in a cultural context. I deduced that the bowls were not produced in isolation so they should share traits with other bronze objects. I found that was more true than I realized years later, when I began real scientific study with metallurgists. Before that scientific breakthrough, my own eyes guided me on a more cultural and observational quest.

I visited museums around the USA and across Asia to look at bronze. I examined thousands of objects and learned all I could about bronze; how it ages and the many variations in oxidation color and texture. As Himalayan Bowls grew and I was also collecting bowls for The Singing Bowl Museum, I had more and more singing bowls to study. I developed my own timeline and began to categorize the bowls by type based on their age. I noticed that certain shapes coincided with certain time periods. Some types of bowls were always older and other types of bowls were always younger. The pieces fell together nicely and I saw how similar bowls were often similar in age.

Having such a large collection helped me understand the aging process much more, as I could compare many variations of similar bowls. I developed a timeline based on the cultural context. I noticed that the production of better quality bowls seemed to coincide with periods of cultural expansion. The best bowls were produced during times when the best sculptures and paintings were also produced. I was able to separate the bowls by type and time period. My observations of the physical characteristics of the bowls coincided with the time periods I had defined; the oxidation, wear patterns and other signs of age lined up nicely with the cultural context, giving me a clear picture of the different bowl ages. Much of this process started with this one bowl. It was so different than the others, they had to be from different time periods. The questions raised about this bowl helped me create the entire history.

Back in 1999, the bowl had other unusual traits I had never seen. I noticed a series of engravings going around the rim of the bowl. This was the first of what I call the Circle and Dot bowls. Other people give them other names but it should be noted that this pattern is not Buddhist or Hindu in origin. It is an ancient decorative pattern, going back to ancient Persia 1,200 or more years ago. It is a punch design consisting of a dot in the middle and a circle around the dot. It was made with a tool that must have looked like a typical punch to produce the dot, with the addition of a cylinder around the punch. The punch probably had a tapered shape which allowed the cylinder to easily be fitted around it like a metal sleeve. The dot is always deeper than the outer circle and on many bowls the outer circle has faded away. I noticed such wear on my bowl, which gave me a clue early on that the surface of the bowls become worn smooth over time.

It had a more uniformly smooth surface and the metal felt different, somehow more brittle and fragile. I could not explain how, but I felt a difference in the surface that is very subtle. It feels more like glass, less like metal. The surface was more smooth than others in my growing collection. By comparing that glassy, flat texture to others, I had a new distinction about how the metal ages. I thought it was the smoothness of the surface that may make it feel that way but years later I learned it was something more. The metallurgists explained that the texture was in fact different. The older bowls had gone through changes on the molecular level which transformed the metal. It was reaching what they called a “metastable state.” That means the molecules of the metal slow, resulting in a real transformation over time. The early bowls do feel different because of this slow molecular change.

The molecular change also changes the sound. I noticed this bowl sounded more hollow, mellow, warmer than my other antique bowls. It had a soft yet powerful presence. The tone was instantly relaxing and the vibration felt slow and easy. It felt old in every way; it even sounded old. Most dating of antique singing bowls is done by looking at the wear pattern of the metal. Bronze shows predicable signs of age, especially under magnification. Looking at wear is an effective way to judge the age of a bowl from the late period, made within the last 400 years. However, problems arise when using these methods on older pieces. In order to really understand the history of singing bowls, I needed more than my observational and cultural methods.

The bowl had a peculiar wavy line going around the rim. I looked at it with a magnifying glass and could not understand what I was looking at. It was a very organic looking fissure going around the whole bowl, like the edge had somehow been cracked in a continuous line without interruption, just below the rim. I could not understand how such a line had formed. It was extremely close to the rim and went all the way around the bowl. If it was caused by damage, I thought it would show chips and breaks at the rim but there was no such damage. If it was a crack, how did it go all the way around the bowl? Why did it form so perfectly? Why did it look wavy and organic? Why were there no chips or perpendicular cracks? In my imagination, I visualized the crack and thought it looked like a fault line from an earthquake. I realized that was close to the truth. The top and bottom of the fissure were always a match, as if they had been together at one point and then separated. The wave was the same on the top and bottom of the fissure.

Once I had the idea that the metal was a fissure separating, it was obvious what had happened: the metal had been folded and this fissure was where the two ends of metal met. The fold had separated. I thought it was similar to making a pie crust, pinching the edges together to seal the top of the crust with the side. In the case of this bowl, the edges were hammered together and the seam had separated over time. I looked for other bowls which displayed the same characteristics. Once I started traveling to Nepal, I found them.

It took 10 years to know for certain that I was right. The metallurgists confirmed that the metal was folded. It is an amazing handmade process that has been lost to history. Only the early singing bowls made over 400 years ago feature outwardly folded metal at the rim. When the bowl shape is made, the top is uneven. Late period singing bowls even out the shape by scraping the top with a steel tool. This method is still employed today. Many later jambati were made with an inward fold, where the waste of the rim is hammered into the inside of the rim. However, the early bowls were outwardly folded. The excess metal at the top was hammered outward and down, hammered into the outside of the bowl. The metal would overlap around the outside of the bowl where it would be reheated and hammered smooth. Hammering the excess metal into the outside of the bowl effectively erased the seam while producing a perfectly smooth rim.

The seam was additionally punched with designs. Designs have been thought of as symbolic or merely decorative. Today we know from my work that they were actually functional. The decorative punches effectively sealed any remaining fissures along the seam, assuring a long lasting product. The technique was very effective; the seams hold for many years, often for centuries.

The presence of fold separation is one of the surest tests of age but many old bowls have made it through the centuries with no fold separation. We know they are folded by the type of bowl. A circle and dot bowl like this one was almost always folded although as The Singing Bowl Museum collection also reveals, the circle and dot punch tool survived into the late period, with a small number of later, non-folded bowls sharing this design.

My work culminated in 2010 when I worked with the Archaeological Metallurgists at Oxford University. They were able to confirm my dating system and their scientific results completed the historic picture. My early work formed a solid foundation which proved to be very accurate. The metallurgists used an electron microscope to examine bowls from each time period. Their results not only confirmed my dating system but greatly expanded it.

They determined that there are two types of antique singing bowls, which I call the early period and late period singing bowls. The early bowls were based on bronze bowls from ancient Persia and Khorosan made from the 9th to 12th centuries. These bowls are well known in the antique world and many of them display the same decorative patterns as the early singing bowls. The circle and dot pattern on this one bowl is such an ancient design, going back to those Persian bowls, if not earlier possibly all the way back to the Bronze Age. The singing bowls not only share the same decorative patterns. The metallurgists determined the relationship based on microscopic details in how the metal was smelted, hammered and reheated. They found the early singing bowls were made with the same methods as their predecessors from ancient Persia, including the unique folding technique found in this one singing bowl.

The later singing bowls were not folded. They were made using simpler techniques. The metallurgists determined that later singing bowls were metallurgically similar to bowls from Southeast Asia, which I have seen in Cambodia and Thailand. They are indistinguishable from late period singing bowls, the technology having been brought to the Himalayas around the 16th century. Within a generation, virtually all the early type of singing bowl manufacturing was replaced by the newer, easier construction methods which required a fraction of the time to make. The late period bowls took over and their age coincided perfectly with my dating system.

By 2010 I had a complete picture of singing bowl history, reinforced by the amazing scientific work done at Oxford. Their work concluded that the early bowls were a continuation of the Persian tradition, imported along the silk roads, conservatively starting around the 12th century. My one bowl is one of these early types and my dating of about 800 years seemed to be accurate. While I was correct in my assessment all those years ago, it took me years to understand why.

Now we have a more definitive idea of the history, especially since we can connect the Himalayan singing bowls to two other traditions from ancient Persia and Southeast Asia. As I maintain in The Singing Bowl Book, the Himalayan Bowls have much more in common with these types of bowls than with singing bowls from China and Japan, which are very different. The singing bowls from China and Japan seem to have been independently developed, perhaps based on an oral description of the Himalayan bowls. This is just one of the fascinating points I talk about in The Singing Bowl Book.

The bowls I dated in the early years for Himalayan Bowls were sometimes dated too conservatively. I dated the earliest bowls as “16th century or earlier,” uncertain about the early dates. I suspected the bowls could be as old as 1,000 years but until the work with Oxford, I could not be sure. My work with the metallurgists was the necessary key to really know the dates but even that would not have been enough on its own. The cultural work I did was also crucial, tracking down antiques in several countries and noticing details in the different types of bowls. I got so good at looking at the bowls that today I can tell which workshop an antique bowl was made in. I do not know the makers names but I know their handiwork. I can discern many different types of bowls by their construction, age and decoration.

As I have discussed in other articles, The Singing Bowl Museum is the culmination of my understanding of these distinctions. This website examines the entire historic scope of the singing bowls, starting with their earliest forms about 1,000 years old. Since we now know that they are related to earlier bowls from Persia and Khorosan, we have a continuous timeline from those 9th century bowls until today. Without this one bowl, I may never have discovered this hidden piece of world history.