Tibetan Singing Bowls

Buying a Tibetan singing bowl online

Buying a singing bowl without holding it first is the thing that stops most people. It is a sound instrument, every hand-made one is different, and a photograph tells you nothing about the tone. Three things here are designed around that problem.

• You are not gambling on which bowl arrives. A certified sound healer plays the candidates that match your order and chooses the best one for you, rather than shipping whichever unit is nearest the packing bench.
• You hear it before it leaves. Ask and we will record your actual bowl, struck and rim-played, and send you the video before dispatch. If it is not right, say so and she picks again.
• You get exactly the specification you ordered. Diameter, finish and musical note are yours to set, with engraving included free. Nothing is out of stock in the size or note you wanted, because the bowl is chosen for your order.

Orders ship from Kathmandu within 2–3 days by DHL Express with tracking, worldwide, and prices show in your own currency. If you would rather ask before you buy, tell us what you need it for and we will send three suggestions with sound videos.

What healer-selected actually means

Most singing bowl shops are run by exporters. Bowls arrive from a workshop in batches, are photographed once, and are listed. Nobody plays them. The listing describes the decoration, because the decoration is the only thing the seller can judge.

We work the other way round, and the selection happens after you order rather than before. Sunita Poudel completed her advanced sound healing certification at the Golden Temple Singing Bowl & Healing Center in Patan Durbar Square, and she uses these bowls in her own practice and teaching. When your order comes in, she goes through the bowls of that type and size in the workshop — often dozens of candidates — and plays each one. What she is listening for:

• A clean fundamental. The note should be steady, not wavering or beating against itself. A wobble usually means uneven wall thickness from a rushed hammering.
• Overtones that blend. A good bowl produces a fundamental wrapped in a halo of upper partials that sit with it. A poor one produces partials that fight the fundamental and make the tone feel restless.
• Sustain. The tone should decay slowly and evenly. A bowl that dies quickly has usually been made with too little tin or too thin a wall.
• Even response around the rim. You should be able to start the bowl singing from any point on the rim with the same pressure. Bowls with a flat spot are common and rarely mentioned by sellers.
• No cracks or stress lines. Checked by ear as much as by eye — a hairline flaw changes the decay before it becomes visible.

This is also why we do not publish a sound clip on every product page. The bowl in a stock recording is never the bowl you receive, and on a hand-hammered instrument the difference is audible. Instead we record your bowl once it has been chosen, and send you the video before it ships. If you want to hear it first, just ask.

If you tell us what you need it for — daily meditation, a sound bath, bodywork, a specific chakra note — she selects for that. A therapy bowl and a meditation bowl of the same diameter are chosen on completely different criteria.

Where the bowls come from

Directly from the artisan families we work with in Kathmandu — no wholesaler and no importer in between, which is why the same bowl costs less here than it does through a Western reseller. To meet the people who make them, read about the master bowl makers of Nepal.

You choose the specification. Engraving is free.

Almost every bowl on this site is configurable before it is made and selected. This is not a separate "custom" product line — it is how ordinary orders work here.

• Diameter. Most designs run across a range of sizes, so you are not forced to accept whatever diameter the photograph happens to show. Pick the size that suits the space and the practice.
• Finish. Natural, antique, black painted with gold interior, tiger eye, copper, multicolour — the same form in the finish you actually want.
• Musical note. Choose the note your practice calls for, mapped to the chakras from C at the Root through to B at the Crown, rather than accepting whatever arrives.
• Engraving, at no extra cost. A name, a date, a mantra, a dedication. Cut by hand by the same thanka-trained artists who do our mantra work. Most shops charge for this or do not offer it at all.

Put the two things together and it is a fairly unusual proposition: you specify the bowl, the artisans make it to that specification, and then a certified sound healer selects and plays the best example before it ships to you. A bowl bought from a warehouse shelf has been through none of those steps.

If you want something outside the standard options entirely — an unusual size, a specific engraving design, a matched set — start with custom singing bowls and tell us what you have in mind.

How this is different from other singing bowl shops

Almost every specialist singing bowl site works the same way. A buyer travels, filters a large pile down to a few hundred keepers, photographs and records each one, and lists them as individual items. You then scroll through recordings until something resonates. It is a good model, and the better sites do it well.

It also has three consequences the shops rarely mention. The bowl you fall for is often already sold. You take whatever size, finish and note that particular bowl happens to be, because it is a single object. And the selection was made against the buyer's taste, months ago, with no idea who you are or what you need it for.

We do it the other way round:

• You specify first. Diameter, finish and note are yours to choose on the product page, plus free engraving. You are not limited to the combinations that happen to be sitting on a shelf.
• Selection happens after, and for you. Sunita plays the candidates matching your specification and chooses the best one. Tell us it is for bodywork rather than meditation and she selects on different criteria entirely.
• Then you hear it. We record your actual bowl and send the video before it ships. A stock clip on a product page is always a different bowl; ours is the one going in the box.
• Nothing sells out from under you. Because the bowl is chosen for your order, the size and note you want are not gone because somebody else got there first.

Neither approach is wrong. If you want to browse recordings of antique collectors' pieces, the specialist collectors do that better than anyone. If you want a bowl built to your specification and then chosen by ear by someone who uses these instruments professionally, that is what we do.

How to choose a Tibetan singing bowl

Most people arrive at a wall of singing bowls and find objects that look broadly similar. They are not. The differences that matter are shape, wall thickness, diameter and forging method — and each changes the sound in a way you can hear immediately once you know what to listen for. What follows is how we would guide someone standing in our workshop in Kathmandu.

Begin with what the bowl is for. That narrows the field faster than anything else.

For personal meditation

A 5 to 7 inch bowl is right. It sits comfortably in the palm or on a cushion, it is forgiving if your rim-playing technique is still developing, and the tone holds your attention without filling the room. Look at handmade bowls in this range, or the hand-casted bowls if you want to try the practice before committing. This is the size most first-time buyers should choose.

For sound baths and group sessions

You need volume, sustain, and more than one voice. A 9 to 11 inch bowl carries across a room where a 6 inch bowl does not. Most practitioners build toward a chakra set — seven tuned notes from Root (C) to Crown (B), from simple hand-beaten sets up to professionally selected antique Thadobati. If you are building gradually, buy the large bowl first; the reverse order leaves you without a foundation tone.

For bodywork, massage and therapy

A genuinely different requirement, and one where wall thickness matters more than diameter. A therapy bowl needs thick walls to produce vibration you feel through the body rather than sound you only hear. Our therapy and Jhumka bowls are hammered heavier for exactly this. A thin decorative bowl of the same diameter will not do this job, whatever it costs.

For collectors

Go to the antique and collected bowls — genuine older pieces sourced from Himalayan households and monasteries in Jambati, Thadobati, Manipuri, Naga pedestal, Goalbati, Mani and Lingam forms, from small Thadobati cups to full-size Jambati. Decades of use alters the metal's harmonic structure in a way that cannot be manufactured. Each is a single piece; when it is gone it is gone.

The classical bowl forms, and why they sound different

Himalayan bowls are classified by form, not by decoration, and each form has a recognisable sonic character. Most online stores never use these names. We do, because they are the accurate description of what you are buying — and because once you know them you can shop by sound rather than by photograph. Our guide to singing bowl types goes further on each.

• Thadobati — straight high walls, flat bottom. Bright, clear, focused, with strong high overtones. The classic meditation bowl and the most common antique form.
• Jambati — large and heavy, rounded body, inward-curving rim. Deep, slow, low fundamental. The foundation bowl of a healing kit and the most sought-after antique shape.
• Manipuri — shallow, wide, thin-walled with a flattened base. Light, quick to respond, shimmering upper register. Often the oldest pieces in any collection.
• Koprebati — thicker walls and a distinctive rim profile, giving a warm middle register between Thadobati brightness and Jambati depth.
• Lingam — a raised protrusion at the centre with a corresponding navel beneath. Ritually significant and acoustically distinctive: the central mass shifts the overtone pattern and produces an unusually centred tone.
• Jhumka — bell-shaped with deliberately thick walls, built for long sustain and strong physical vibration. The practitioner's choice for therapy work.
• Ultabati — very large, with a deeply curved wall and pronounced inward rim. The deepest fundamental of any Himalayan form and the rarest to find in good condition.
• Naga pedestal — a bowl on an integrated raised foot. Rare, and seen mostly in antique pieces.

What size do you actually need

Diameter drives both tone and price. As a working rule, each additional inch lowers the fundamental, lengthens the sustain, and adds roughly 25 to 40 percent to the price — it takes proportionally more metal and considerably more hammering.

If you are searching for a big singing bowl specifically, the 11 to 13 inch range is what you mean — these are the large standing bowls, heavy enough to sit stable on the floor and deep enough that the vibration is felt rather than only heard. Our full size guide covers which sizes suit small rooms and which need space to open up.

Handmade, hand-casted or antique — what the price buys

Hand-casted bowls are poured into a mould, then finished and often hand-beaten or etched. Even wall thickness, smooth finish, clean and predictable tone. A sensible entry point and an excellent gift.

Handmade, hand-hammered bowls start as a heated metal disc and are shaped by thousands of hammer strikes, by hand, by a smith judging wall thickness by feel. This is what produces the layered overtone structure people mean when they talk about the sound of a real Himalayan bowl. Two bowls of identical size from the same smith will not sound identical — that variability is the point.

Antique and collected bowls are older pieces, typically fifty to a hundred years old or more. Their tone has matured through decades of use, and their value is as much historical as acoustic.

All three are forged from the traditional seven-metal alloy — copper and tin as the structural bell-metal base, with iron, zinc, lead, silver and gold in small proportions. The copper-to-tin ratio is what governs how long a bowl sustains and how its overtones separate; too much tin and the metal turns brittle, too little and the tone dies quickly. For what each metal does to the sound, including the lead question that deserves a straight answer, read our explanation of the seven metals.

It is worth being honest about a wider point. A great deal of what is sold online as a Tibetan bowl is spun or pressed brass with a decorative finish, made in minutes rather than hours. Those bowls are not fraudulent, but they are a different object, and they sound like one. Everything on this page is hand worked.

How to tell an authentic Himalayan bowl from a factory one

The phrase "Tibetan singing bowl" is used loosely, and a great deal of what sells online is machine-spun brass finished to look hand-made. Four checks separate a genuine Nepal singing bowl — sometimes called a Tibetan prayer bowl — from a reproduction. Look for visible hammer marks that vary in depth and spacing rather than a repeating machine pattern. Listen for overtones that layer and drift slightly rather than a single clean pitch that dies quickly. Check whether the wall thickness varies subtly around the bowl, as hand-hammered metal always does. And ask whether the seller can send you a recording of the specific bowl, not a stock clip — a shop selling identical factory units has no reason to refuse, and a shop selling individual hand-made bowls has no way to avoid it.

What comes with your bowl

Every bowl ships with a wooden mallet and a cushion or ring as standard, at no extra cost. Larger bowls from 10 inches upward include a heavier suede-wrapped striker suited to their mass. Sets arrive with a mallet per bowl. Mallet upgrades, felt strikers, silk carry bags and display cushions are in singing bowl accessories.

• Buy direct from the Kathmandu workshop, no importer or middleman
• Ships in 2–3 days from Kathmandu by DHL Express, worldwide
• Sound video on request we record the exact bowl you are considering, before you buy
• Healer-selected every bowl played and approved before stocking
• You pick the spec diameter, finish and musical note on almost every bowl
• Free engraving name, date or mantra, hand-cut, at no extra cost
• Your currency USD, AUD, CAD, EUR and GBP
• Secure checkout Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover, on an SSL-encrypted connection

Free singing bowl healing course, included with your bowl

A bowl on its own teaches you very little. Most people who buy one strike it a few times, enjoy the sound, and then are not sure what to do next — which is why so many singing bowls end up as ornaments.

So we wrote a free singing bowl healing course and it is open to every customer at no cost. It is drawn from the working notes of a practising Himalayan sound healer rather than assembled from the internet, and it covers striking and rim-playing technique, how to hold and position the bowl, water-bowl and body-placement work, how to build and run a session for someone else, and how the notes map to the chakras in practice rather than in theory.

Alongside it there are three tools you can use straight away: the live singing bowl tuner to measure any bowl's frequency through your microphone, the chakra quiz to work out which note suits what you are working on, and how to play a singing bowl for the basics if you have never held one.

Common questions

What does healer-selected mean?
Every bowl is struck and rim-played by our founder, a certified sound healer, before it is listed. She is checking for a steady fundamental, overtones that blend rather than fight, even sustain, and a rim that responds the same at any point. Bowls that fail are not stocked.

Which singing bowl should a complete beginner buy?
A 6 or 7 inch handmade bowl. Large enough for a satisfying tone, small enough to handle easily, forgiving of imperfect technique. Our complete choosing guide walks through the decision in depth.

Can I hear the bowl before I order?
Yes. Because your bowl is chosen individually after you order, we record that specific bowl and send you the video before it ships. We do not publish stock clips, because the bowl in a stock recording is never the bowl you receive.

Can I choose the size, finish and note?
Yes, on almost every bowl on this site. Diameter, finish and musical note are selectable on the product page, and personal engraving — a name, a date, a mantra — is free.

What is included with the bowl?
A wooden mallet and a cushion or ring come with every bowl at no extra cost. Bowls of 10 inches and above include a heavier suede-wrapped striker. Sets include a mallet for each bowl.

How long does delivery take, and what does it cost?
Orders leave Kathmandu within 2–3 days and ship by DHL Express worldwide with tracking. Prices display in USD, AUD, CAD, EUR or GBP. Full detail is on our delivery information and returns policy pages.

Do you supply studios and retailers?
Yes. We started out as a wholesale supplier and still supply studios, therapists and shops. Contact us for trade pricing.

Do you teach how to use the bowl?
Yes. Our free singing bowl healing course is open to everyone at no cost and covers technique, session structure and chakra work, drawn from a practising Himalayan healer's own notes.

How do I care for a singing bowl?
Very little is needed, but cleaning matters with regular use. See cleansing and charging a Tibetan singing bowl.