Author: Richard Fraser
Mala Beads
Of the nearly 7 million ethnic Tibetans living in China today, approximately 4 million live outside the Tibet Autonomous Region. Nearly 2 million of these live in Sichuan Province in the country’s southwest, where the epicentre of Tibetan culture is Wuhouci, otherwise known as “Little Lhasa”, in the heart of Chengdu.
Chengdu has long been the frontier to the Tibetan borderlands since at least the 9th century. It has a floating population of between 100,000 and 200,000 ethnic Tibetans, which fluctuates depending on the season as people move back and forth between the city and the Tibetan-speaking areas of the countryside.
Wuhouci is a neighbourhood comprising hundreds of Tibetan shops, restaurants, and businesses catering to the Tibetan community. Street names are written in Tibetan; there are various Tibetan-run shops, hotels, and health clinics; and drivers wait on the side of the road looking to shuttle people back and forth between the countryside and the city.
Wuhouci also caters to the vast Tibetan monastic community who visit Chengdu from monasteries all over the countryside. They come to purchase their robes, bags, and clothing, as well as furniture, statues, and ornaments for their respective Buddhist institutions. It is not uncommon to see monks window-shopping for a new Buddha figurine; bargaining with shop assistants over prices; and making payments via the mobile phone and social media app, Wechat.
At the heart of this religious-commercial world is the japamala, or simply mala. This is a loop of prayer beads commonly used in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism for counting recitations when performing japa (reciting a mantra or other sacred sound) or for counting some other sadhana (spiritual practice) such as prostrating before a holy icon. Like other prayer beads used in Christianity and Islam, the main body of a mala comprises 108 beads of roughly the same size and material. A distinctive 109th “guru bead”, not used for counting, marks the ‘starting point’ of one’s recitations. Mantras are repeated hundreds or even thousands of times, with the mala enabling the practitioner to focus on the meaning or sound of the mantra rather than counting its repetitions.
Over the past few years, I have been doing fieldwork in Wuhouci on the mala bead market. What makes them so interesting is that they cut across the realms of both the economic and the spiritual, and which challenges our own assumptions about the nature of materials as understood from the perspective of a western naturalistic ontology.
On the one hand, malas are material objects with clear economic value. This value is tied to their materiality and their origins. Made from a variety of materials such as wood, stone, seeds, bone, and precious metals, they begin their life as ‘natural’ materials in the environment – as trees, plants, and rocks – often originating along China’s border regions and in other parts of Asia (e.g. Myanmar, Nepal, India). There they are harvested, crafted, and carved, and then strung with natural fibres such as cotton, silk, or animal hair, but which nowadays often consist of synthetic materials such as nylon or monofilament. Next, they are transported across the border and into the lucrative Chinese market, by traders and middlemen, who then sell the ready-made malas to settled retailers in shops such as those in Wuhouci. I have watched as every week, traders arrive with truckloads of malas in the form of packaged boxes, which are opened and displayed on the shelves of the sellers – and finally bought and finding their way into the hands and prayer bags of monks and lay people alike.
At the same time, however, malas are also spiritual objects with direct links to the nonhuman world. This is something which again intersects with their materiality. Indeed, different mala materials are favoured for different purposes and carry their own spiritual value. For example, crystal, pearl, or other clear or white malas are used to count mantras, appease devas, celestial deities, or purify the practitioner; meanwhile, beads of gold, silver, copper, or lotus seeds are intended to increase lifespan, knowledge, or merit; those made from ground sandal wood, saffron, and other fragrant substances are used to tame other humans; beads from rudraksha seeds or human bones are said to subdue malicious spirits or afflictions; while those made of bodhi wood can be used for multiple purposes, including reciting all kinds of mantras, as well as prayers, prostrations, circumambulations, and so forth.
Here it is impossible to distinguish between the economic and the spiritual. Indeed, in addition to their practical function and aide in recitation, malas are ascribed agency and a kind of power, with the mala seen as having clear talismanic qualities. In some traditions, malas are consecrated before use in a manner similar to images of deities, through the use of mantras or the application of pigment. Meanwhile, malas purchased from temples and monasteries are often blessed at that institution, or they can be blessed later by a monk or holy person. Popular folk tales describe malas as becoming imbued with the power of the many recitations it has been used for, or a mala given by a highly respected monk is said to have the power to cure illnesses or to restore fertility.
Seen from this perspective, malas are apt examples of material objects which break down the distinction between the social and the material, the practical and the symbolic. They are thus ‘good to think with’, especially for an anthropology that seeks to reinvigorate material culture studies with ontological questions about the nature of Being and reality. This is on par with Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell’s work on “Thinking Through Things” (2007), which presents ethnographic accounts of people’s relationships with objects and tries to take seriously their experiences of them as ‘more than just material’. This draws explicitly on the ‘new animism’ and perspectivist theory, and in particular the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) and Martin Holbraad (2007). They argue we need to take the claims of informants seriously and grant them ontological weight, rather than treat them merely as imaginative interpretations or metaphors. For example, in Mongolia, a shamanic costume is not just a composite of clothing and material but an inter-cosmic portal allowing access to other planes of existence; in Swaziland, legal documents not only evoke questions of reason or argument; and in Holbraad’s (2007) famous example, the powder used by Cuban diviners does not simply represent power, or act as a metaphor, it is power in a literal sense.
Here the dualism between concept and thing, central to Western thought and ontology, is collapsed and, as such, a vision of a different world emerges. A world which gives equal and valid weight to materials as active agents with the capacity to act – and activate. This is something which connects to Tim Ingold’s discussion about animism and personhood vis-a-vis the ‘ontological turn’, but also an ontological turn “to things” that emphasises the significance of “materials” within materiality (Ingold 2011).
As Ingold puts it: “The properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be identified as fixed, essential attributes of things, but are rather processual and relational. They are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix and mutate” (2011:30).
This is an essential part of the ontological turn that constitutes an animist relational perspective. In this understanding, there is a fluid continuum of on-going relationships among materials, materiality and, in the context of the japamala, the experiences of those who use them. More radically, this perspective obliges us to question our own taken-for-granted assumptions, and through which we might develop new and novel understandings. For example, it forces us ask: what exactly is a mala to my Tibetan and Han-Chinese interlocutors? Of course, in its pure material sense, a mala is a ‘just’ a material – something bought and sold and made of physical ‘stuff’ such as wood, stone, seeds, bone, and metal. But seen from another perspective – and from another ontological vantage point – it is also something more. For many, a mala literally has agency – it has hau (in the Maori sense of the term) – the ability to act, activate, and affect, not only the practitioner but the people and world around them. And this activation is determined not by the materiality – but the materials themselves; by the agency of wood, stone, powder, and metal. In short, a mala is more-than-human, and thus demands we take seriously the experiences of those who use them to activate relations across the intra-cosmic divide.
Indeed, not only does a mala raise questions about the nature of reality, the ontological status of spirits and more-than-human entities, but it also presses us to rethink what we mean by the ‘material’. For example, how is it that a piece of wood or seed extracted from a forest in Myanmar ends up being imbued with spiritual and talismanic agency on the streets of Chengdu? At what point does this agency emerge? And who has the skill to craft, harness, and deploy this agency in different contexts of social and spiritual interaction? Furthermore, what is the relationship between this more-than-human agency and the economic value of the material itself? In other words, can a ‘cheap’ or low-cost mala have the same power than a more ‘expensive’ one? And who determines the price? These are just some of the questions I am seeking to explore in my fieldwork, and they raise important issues not only for anthropology but archaeology, philosophy, and the wider social sciences.
References
De Castro, E.V., 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal anthropological Institute, pp.469-488.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, Sari Wastell, eds., 2007. Thinking through Things. Thinking through things. Theorising artefacts ethnographically.
Holbraad, M., 2007. Multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana, again). Thinking through things, p.189.
Ingold, T. ed., 2011. Redrawing anthropology: Materials, movements, lines. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..