Tibetan Singing Bowls - Los Cuencos Cantores Tibetanos

Abstract

Tibetan Singing Bowls exemplify key features of American religion: creativity, commodification, and conflict. Histories published in popular and scholarly outlets portray these objects as ancient Buddhist artifacts, beloved both because they originated in a place imagined as quintessentially spiritual and because their benefits have been confirmed by modern science. Yet, few if any such objects are ancient or Tibetan. Beginning in the 1970s, Asian and American sellers and American buyers created the concept of “Tibetan Singing Bowls” and invested material objects so-denoted with spiritual-scientific meanings that made them into valuable commodities. As newly invented symbols of ancient Tibetan Buddhism, these objects generated interest and controversy— particularly when used to teach mindfulness meditation in public schools. As cultural conflicts played out in the 2010s, the “secularization” of mindfulness featured the removal of “religious” objects that were only recently conceptualized as either spiritual or religious. This cultural history illustrates how modern interest in “spirituality” and “science” overlap, while exhibiting the malleability of concepts of “religion” and “secularity.”