Tibetan Singing Bowls - Los Cuencos Cantores Tibetanos
American Religion 2020 DOI: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.03 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Buddhism Meditation |
| Keywords | Singing Aesthetics Spirituality Spiritual practice Commodification Secularity Literature Religious studies Archaeology |
| Citations | 3 |
| Key points | Argues that Tibetan Singing Bowls are a modern invention from the 1970s, not ancient artifacts, and that their use in public schools sparked cultural conflicts over secularization. |
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 controversyparticularly 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.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience | 1995 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |