Observations of prayer wheel wear pads in Lhasa and Kathmandu
This article explores an apparently insignificant, mundane object – the wear pad of a Tibetan prayer wheel – to show how it can have interesting and diverse trajectories even after it has become useless as a wear pad. Worn-down wear pads have acquired new values because they were polished by the prayer wheel rotations.
The authors
Trine Brox, Associate Professor, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Kirsten Skov Vang, MA Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
Heng Peng, Ph.D.-student, School of History, Sichuan University, and Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The three authors have collected data on prayer wheel wear pads in Lhasa, Kathmandu, Dharamshala, and Chengdu following a research guide developed by Trine Brox. In this article, Heng Peng relates her observations in Lhasa, central Tibet (July 2018), and Kirsten Skov Vang in Kathmandu, Nepal (February-April 2019), whereas Trine Brox framed and edited the article. Their collaboration grew from the latter’s interest in the different materials, imaginaries, and trajectories of the stuff that constitutes contemporary Buddhism, which is explored in the project WASTE: Consumption and Buddhism in the age of garbage.
Figure 1-2: Unused prayer wheel wear pads of different qualities bought in Lhasa and Kathmandu. Photographed facing up (figure 1) and facing down (figure 2). Photo by Trine Brox, Copenhagen, June 2023.
The prayer wheel
The Tibetan prayer wheel is a device that does the repetitive job of rotating sacred Buddhist text to produce merit, blessings, and good fortune. The text will often be a scroll with the repeated copy of a mantra (sacred syllables), the most popular being the six-syllable mantra of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion: oṁ maṇi padme hūṁ. When one sets the prayer wheel in motion, the prayer wheel drum with the sacred text will rotate and each rotation is considered a recitation of the script it contains. Elderly Tibetans commonly engage in prayer wheel practice, believing it produces vast amounts of merit, blessings, and good fortune not only to the practitioner, but also other sentient beings in its proximity.
For more information about the Tibetan prayer wheel: Brox, Trine 2022: "What is the Value of a Tibetan Prayer Wheel?" Social Compass 69 (2): 205-222. Brox, Trine 2018 "Tekst, teknologi og trope: Det tibetanske bedehjul". Fund og Forskning 57: 189-220. Ladner, Lorne, ed. 2000. The Wheel of Great Compassion: The Practice of the Prayer Wheel in Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Photo by Trine Brox, Dharamshala, September 2019.
The wear pad: dung
Photo by Trine Brox, Copenhagen, June 2023.
The handheld prayer wheel (Tib.: lag ‘khor) is composited of a drum revolving around a fixed stick that is stuck into a handle (see figure 4). Underneath the drum is a bamboo tube (snyug ma) that rotates with the drum. Beneath the tube is a dung (maṇi dung or dung rtse), separating the handle from the rotating bamboo tube, that functions as a wear pad. The wear pad is usually made of shell, but we have also seen other materials such as different kinds of plastics, metals, and cattle bone. When we talk about wear pads in this article, we mean the wear pads made from shell, which is most common in handmade, handheld prayer wheels.
The wear pad is disc-shaped and slightly curved. It has a perforation in the middle so that it can be threaded on to the central stick. The sharp edges of the rolling bamboo tube will polish the dung and with time cause it to split into two objects: a small bead that can be separated from the wear pad and a bigger, outer disc that is left of the wear pad after the bead has been removed (Figure 5).
Now it can no longer function as a wear pad and therefore must be replaced. This exhaustion of the wear pad due to abrasion is a major incentive for prayer wheel practice for some of our elderly Tibetan interlocutors.
It took elderly Tibetan interlocutors from one week to several years to exhaust one dung. It depends on how much they use the prayer wheel and the material qualities of the wear pad. Albeit the functional value of a dung as a wear pad is diminished with every rotation that consumes it, we have learned that another kind of value is simultaneously augmented that relates to its efficacy since the dung bead now can be used as an amulet or as a bead in mala. Trine Brox has detailed this in her article “There is more to wear than waste: The afterlives of the sacred and the empowered in Tibetan Buddhism” that is forthcoming in a volume on Tibetan materialities edited by Emma Martin, Trine Brox, and Diana Lange.
The status of the outer disc is rather more ambiguous. In the following, we relate some observations from important circumambulation paths in Kathmandu and Lhasa, where people practice with prayer wheels, and we also relate what our interlocutors, mostly elderly Tibetans, told us about the prayer wheel dung.
Observations from Kathmandu
Observations in Kathmandu took place in Boudhanath, a predominantly Tibetan Buddhist neighbourhood in the Kathmandu Valley. Boudhanath is best known for the landmark after which it is named: the great Boudha Stupa, an important pilgrimage site to Buddhists in the Himalayas. A stupa is a solid monument which contains religious relics, sometimes also the remains of high-ranking, Buddhist teachers. When practitioners circumambulate such a stupa, they accumulate merit. It takes several minutes to walk around the Boudha Stupa.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, February 2020.
Visiting the Boudha Stupa for the first time can be overwhelming. It is an impressive white dome embedded in a 3D mandala. On the top is a layered, golden spire on a cube that has painted eyes watching in all four directions. It towers over the three-story buildings surrounding it. The broad circumambulation pathway encircling the stupa is enclosed by a circle of buildings. Being one of the few places in Kathmandu without cars, it almost feels like leaving the rest of the bustling city behind when one visits the stupa. Still, this is a busy place. The stupa is the recipient of offerings, prostrations, and prayers from early sunrise until late in the evening; there is a constant flow of Buddhists circumambulating the stupa, always clockwise, while reciting mantras, running a rosary through their fingers, rotating a prayer wheel, or doing full-length body prostrations. Meanwhile, myriads of tourists visit the stupa. They photograph it and have lunch at the rooftop cafes from where one can get a perfect view of the majestic, sacred monument.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, April 2014.
When I walked around the narrow, enclosed pathway on the first plateau of the stupa, I discovered that the flower beds not only contained flowers but also Buddhist items: clay votives, frayed blessing cords, small deity images, not to mention the daily offerings of fresh flowers and lit butter lamps. Yet, unlike Heng Peng’s observation from a circumambulation path in Lhasa, where it is common to place used outer dung discs in sacred places, I did not observe discarded prayer wheel wear pads on the inner or outer path surrounding the stupa during my fieldwork.
Beads made from dung were often visible, however, on the rosaries of Tibetan Buddhists whom I saw in the vicinity of the stupa. Several of them had either added dung beads to their prayer beads to keep count of their mantra recitation, or produced enough beads to createa mala made of 108 dung beads. Whenever I circumambulated the stupa and approached Buddhist practitioners with such prayer beads, they related to me that they believed the beads were blessed. I have not witnessed anyone wearing used outer discs as prayer beads.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, March 2019.
However, to my surprise, I found great amounts of new as well as used dung in the shops surrounding Boudha Stupa. The buildings facing the stupa mostly functioned as guesthouses and restaurants on the upper floors while the ground floors housed shops that sold religious objects, souvenirs, and handicrafts. Other shops, mostly located in the arcades and alleys connected to the stupa, also sold deity statues and other Buddhist paraphernalia as well as large handmade prayer wheels. The handicraft shops immediately surrounding the Boudha Stupa displayed boxes filled with beads, coloured blessing cords, and plastic bags full of rosaries and jewellery. It was also in such shops that I found dung and discovered that outer discs have monetary value and can be objects of exchange.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, February 2019.
Dung were very visible in the shops; I found boxes and bags of conch shells in various sizes, including outer discs, on the floors and doorsteps of most of the showrooms. When I asked about the bags and baskets full of dung, the Nepalese salesmen working there told me that they bought them from India. The salesman in a shop called Lovely Souvenir said that some people would buy these pieces of conch shell to make jewellery. At New Boudha Handicraft, the salesman explained that he bought the mixture of completely new and used discs by the kilo. His customers would make them into jewellery such as necklaces and earrings, or ‘lucky objects,’ as he called it. In several shops, new and old dung were neatly separated while in other shops the pieces were laying in a mixture of beads, seashells, and broken pendants. The used outer discs could be found in various conditions; some were still brightly white, whereas others had turned grey. Some had one hole from where one bead had been removed, others had several holes. Lovely Souvenir could sell a used dung at 100 Nepali Rupees. According to one of my interlocutors, the price of new and used wear pads in Boudhanath was between 20 and 30 Nepalese Rupees, but it used to be 10.
Looking down at the rows of dirty plastic boxes full of used dung, I wondered about the journey that these discs had been on; having been supports of rotating mantra scrolls inside prayer wheels of practitioners in India, they had ended up among seashells and broken beads on the floors of local handicraft shops in Nepal – now waiting to be bought and repurposed in imaginative ways. These discs, supposedly bought by the kilo from India, were the remains of someone’s merit accumulation, but at some point, the practitioners must have decided to exchange, sell, or simply discard them, perhaps not perceiving them to have any value.
In general, the outer discs did not seem to hold much significance among most of my interlocutors. They were not important enough to hold onto after they had finished serving their purpose as wear pads. Some practitioners stated that they would hand in outer discs in local shops in exchange for new ones. Depending on the interlocutor, and most likely their preferred store, three to five outer discs could be exchanged for a brand new one. Instead of spending money on new dung, it could simply be exchanged. Nonetheless, I did also meet interlocutors who had found secondary uses of these shell wear pads after they had been worn out through prayer wheel practice.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, March 2019.
While drinking butter tea in the home of Sherab and Dekyi, a couple in their seventies originating from Limi Valley, Sherab presented an alternative to exchanging outer discs for a new one. When a new stupa was being constructed, outer discs could be placed inside it as offerings. According to Dekyi, both the dung beads and outer discs held blessings, and back in the day the used outer discs were occasionally used to make prayer beads as well. Their relative, Jetsun, a widow in her sixties, explained during one of my visits in her home, that the white colour of dung represented purity while also being the colour of the deity Avalokiteśvara. Despite her sentiment about the significance of dung, Jetsun exchanged her used outer discs for new ones.
Lhamo, an 86-years old nun from Dolpo, who proudly told me of her pilgrimage to Mount Kailash over tea at a local café, had found other ways to repurpose her outer discs. She had attached an outer disc to add weight to the ball-and-chain governor of her prayer wheel to improve the rotations of the wheel (compare with figure 4). She also donated her outer discs to tantric practitioners so that they could place it on the handle of their ritual drums to prevent them from sliding in their hands. She either threaded the dung beads on to her prayer beads or gave them to children for their protection.
Interestingly, an American-based web shop called Potala Gate, selling ritual goods and Buddhist themed gifts, apparently sells outer discs from Nepal, also repurposed as hand supports for the above-mentioned ritual drums. Beneath the picture of the "drum tail hand support #8" it is advertised that the discs have been blessed by the merit accumulation of Tibetan practitioners in Nepal, as they have been perforated by a rotating prayer wheel. The store also advertises similar hand supports "made out of Scull Bone."
Jigme, a 68-year-old man from Dolpo, dedicated most of his time to religious practice. He related to me that he perceived the dung beads and outer discs to be of equal spiritual value. “Same same,” he proclaimed. Jigme revealed that he kept a collection of outer discs in his home, as he considered them useful in prayer sessions dedicated to the deity Avalokiteśvara or simply beneficial to wear around one’s neck. Illustrating the benefits of dung, he told me that in his home village, it was believed that wearing dung had the power to protect pregnant women from miscarriage.
Photo by Kirsten Skov Vang, Kathmandu, April 2019.
Another practitioner, a Tibetan woman in her sixties, also kept the outer discs that her prayer wheel practice produced. Her prayer wheel was so heavy that she had to rest the prayer wheel handle on a pillow on the floor for support. Her son Lobsang told me that while collecting the beads to make a mala, his mother would hang the outer pieces outside her house for the purpose of bringing good fortune.
Several of my interlocutors, including Tibetan Buddhist scholars, expressed similar views about objects that were empowered by religious practice; things such as dung beads should preferably only be worn and used by the person who produced them. According to Lhamo and Jigme, children were an exception since dung beads could offer children protection even if they had not empowered the dung through producing it themselves.
Observations from Lhasa
Many Lhasa elders have two prayer wheels, one big and heavy that they use at home and the other is small and handy to carry with them when they go in the mornings and evenings to perform circumambulation.
Nowadays, the Lhasa market is flooded by machine-produced goods from Zhejiang, Guangzhou, and Sichuan provinces. The main production and distribution centre for Buddhist goods in mainland China is Sichuan, where one also can find factories specialising in mass-producing the small prayer wheels that elderly Tibetans might take with them as they walk along a circumambulation route in Lhasa. The machine-made prayer wheels account for a large percentage of the Lhasa market and the wear pads on these have been replaced by embedded bearings. Some souvenir prayer wheels for sale in Lhasa had wear pads made of fake coral or beeswax as ornamentation, which obstructed rotation rather than facilitated it. Such new types of prayer wheels were only purchased by tourists and business persons who used them as props in photo shoots to mimic Tibetan aesthetics. Lhasa Tibetans would not call these wear pads dung, but just name them “coral” or “beeswax” in Tibetan language. In other words, to Lhasa Tibetans, not all items lying in the position of the wear pad, i.e. beneath the rolling bamboo tube and above the handle that one holds, could be called dung. Only discs made of white conch material is called dung in Tibetan.
At one store selling Buddhist items, the shopkeeper, who originated from Sichuan, related to me how it was exactly the wear pad that revealed whether the prayer wheel was machine- or handmade. Handmade prayer wheels have wear pads made of shell that are replaceable when they are consumed.
Photo by Heng Peng, Lhasa, July 2018.
There are four popular circumambulation paths in Lhasa, but here I look at the Lingkhor that is the longest. It circles around the entire city of Lhasa, including the Jokhang Temple and Ramoche Temple, passes through the old city, circles the Potala Palace, and ends at the Deji South Road. This route is eight kilometres long and takes about 2-3 hours to walk. On a regular day, only a few people will be walking here, but the Lingkhor was packed with people – locals and pilgrims – on auspicious days in the Tibetan Buddhist calendar such as the first and fifteenth day of Saga Dawa (the 4th month in the Tibetan calendar), the month when Buddha Sakyamuni was born, enlightened, and passed away.
The Linkhor is not only popular for circumambulation, but it is also a popular place for leaving one’s used dung. Because the used outer dung disc is considered blessed (since it has partaken in religious activity), it is the opinion of several interlocutors that it should be deposited in “clean” places. Tibetans consider sacred or high places such as mountains, lakes, stupas, monasteries, and temples as clean places. Nowadays, however, many bustling temples prohibit that one leave personal items there without permission. Nevertheless, some people still place their used dung at high places within a temple or along a circumambulation route encircling a sacred mountain, lake, monastery, and the like. The Lingkhor is a very popular place for storing exhausted dung (see figure 21).
Along the Lingkhor were many shrines and large burners called bsang, which is the place for burning offerings. The large burner at the end of the path also had a heap of mani stones, which are stone slabs with sacred inscriptions. The slabs had been put on top of each other, leaving some space between each stone, where people left outer rings of the used dung and clay votives. By rough estimation, there were more than 60 used dung visibly placed between the stones when I visited one day in July 2018. People had also put religious items such as the outer ring of dung in the large burner.
Albeit these observations tell us that some Tibetans consider the Lingkhor an appropriate storage place for used dung because the place is considered clean, it is not an opinion that is expressed through the practices of everyone, such as the people working to keep the place tidy. When I arrived at the end of the Lingkhor one morning in July 2018, I met a sanitation worker who was cleaning the large burner for smoke offerings. This burner is not only where one will see traditional Tibetan Buddhist smoking offerings, but is also a place where Tibetans will cremate sacred items that they do not want to keep, such as scriptures, blessed strings, and used dung. They consider the fire clean and thus see burning as a reliable method for disposing used religious items. While the sanitation worker was cleaning the fireplace this morning, she was annoyed and kept nagging in Tibetan. She swept the used outer discs of dung into the garbage can without any hesitation and took them away with the regular rubbish. To her, they were a nuisance more than a blessed item – something to be removed to make the place look tidy (figure 16).
Another place where Tibetans will store their used dung is at home. The house shrine is the most popular place to store dung in one’s house since this is the most sacred and clean site in a household. Alternatively, the dung is stringed together – sometimes with other blessed items – and is hung high at the centre of the house gate. This method is only applicable to single-courtyard houses that has a protruding gate frame where one can hang something (figure 17).
Photo by Yulzen, Lhasa, July 2023.
In Lhasa, there are many stores selling new dung: retail in Barkhor Street and wholesale in Barkhor Supermarket. Like observed in Kathmandu, shell products are sold from baskets lying on the ground. Besides, some silver processing shops run by Bai ethnic group from Yunnan Province, who are the main craftsmen of hand-made prayer wheels in Lhasa, also sell new dung to Tibetans who go there anyway to get their prayer wheel repaired.
As I learnt from eight interviews in Lhasa, the time it took to produce a dung that had split into a bead and an outer disc varies. One 77-old retired Tibetan cadre, Tsering, claimed it only took her a week to do this. When they have made a bead, they can drill another hole in the same dung or ask shopkeepers to do it for them. Shopkeepers will charge one Yuan to do it. However, the eight interviewees whom I met in Lhasa all insisted that they used each dung only once.
Tashi has five stalls in Barkhor Supermarket and she has for 20 years dealt with Buddhist commodities supplied from Nepal (figure 18). She has 16 years of experience with the dung wholesale business in Lhasa. She shared:
The people from Amdo, Golog, and Nagqu area, often buy a lot of dung from me, at least 4000 pieces. I sell them for less than one Yuan a piece, but in Nagqu, each dung costs about eight Yuan, not to mention Amdo, which is much further away. The herdsmen often buy a lot of supplies when they come to towns or cities, the business of dung in pastoral area is good, earning seven Yuan.
I was curious to find out whether it was possible to purchase used dung, but none of the people whom I asked in Lhasa believed that was possible. They all replied like “no one would sell it and no one would buy it.” Yet, I did manage to find one antique store selling used dung in Lhasa. If purchased in small quantities, each new dung would cost two to five Yuan. In contrast, the cheapest used outer disc of a dung would cost 80 Yuan in a Lhasa antique store near Barkhor Street, and the most expensive could be purchased for 200 Yuan.
Kesang is a Tibetan antique store shopkeeper from Lhasa. She had 11 outer discs for sale in her store, all of which had been collected from locals in the areas around Ngari, Nagqu, and Chamdo by her father (figure 19). She said:
Actually, there are only few people selling their used dung [outer discs] or prayer wheels. […] I think it violates Buddhism doctrine. Being a Lhasa local, [I know] us Lhasa people would definitely not sell or give it to others. To be frank, we Tibetans believe that the merit that comes with the used dung can only bring luck to its producers, so Tibetans won't buy it. Only a few tourists would buy it to make necklaces.
Compared with the used dung exchange scheme in Kathmandu, I did not come across any public exchange sites in Lhasa. As mentioned above, the people who sold used dung came from pastoral areas and Lhasa Tibetans with whom I spoke considered it inappropriate. As also observed by Kirsten Skov Vang in Kathmandu, some interlocutors offered their used outer discs to temples, believing that the temples would find other purposes for them such as becoming blessed items used to purify newly-built stupas.
Temples seldom ask their parishioners to donate their used dung but the temple will also not accept dung as gifts from everyone. Interlocutors were informed by their connections in the temple when they needed dung, and then they would bring their worn-out wear pads to the temple. Seventy-two years old Lhasa local Dolma told me the used dung had to be purified at home before she would bring it to the temple. She first cleaned the used dung with pure water as well as pine and cypress smoke offerings, as she had learnt from monks. Only then the used dung could be donated to temple: “Such disposal way is clean and sacred, instead of [storing it in an] unclean home.”
Photo by Heng Peng, Lhasa, July 2018.
Post-consumption trajectories
One outcome of prayer wheel practice among our interlocutors is that the wear pad splits into two: a bead and a disc with a big hole from where the bead was removed. There were different perceptions and practices among both laity and religious authorities concerning dung about what should happen with the dung when it had broken into two. Many elderly lay interlocutors told us that they will not discard the dung beads and outer discs. Instead, they might recycle, exchange, repurpose, upcycle, store, cremate, or bury them because they believe that the dung has become blessed through prayer wheel practice.
Reuse: If there is enough space on the outer disc, it can be reused to produce another dung bead. We have seen wear pads that already had two, three, and as much as five holes.
Exchange: Data from Kathmandu shows that the outer discs have monetary value and can be re-circulated. Interlocutors in Kathmandu related that if they gave three to five used outer discs, they would receive one new dung for free. Shops around the Boudanath Stupa sold conch remains, among which were outer discs, that had been traded like this or bought by the kilo in India.
Repurpose: Used outer discs can also be passed on to serve new purposes in other Buddhist practices. Practitioners gave used outer discs to their lama, the local monastery, or tantric community for repurposing. For example, we have seen them attached to the ball-and-chain governor of prayer wheels to add weigh and thus increase the centrifugal power (see figure 4). They can also be seen as earrings in Cham dance masks (thank you, Mareike Wulff) and on the handles of ritual drums.
Store: The outer disc can be stored in places that are elevated or considered pure such as circumambulation routes, mani walls, stupas, and temples where they are tucked in among the stones of a wall or cairn or hung up in trees or prayer wheel walls. They can also be stored at home above the doorframe, on the family shrine, in a cupboard on the house altar, or around the bsang (the place for burning offerings).
Bury or cremate: It is also possible to bury outer discs with votive images in the ‘bum-khang, i.e. the underground disposal of one hundred thousand of votive images. We have also learned how they have been thrown into ritual pyres.
Wear pads have no sacrosanct status before they are used in prayer wheels, so why to their trajectories take them to places that are considered sacred or pure? Why are they not tossed but exchanged and repurposed? Why do they deserve funeral-like destinies? Our observations tell us that the mundane and seemingly insignificant wear pads actually had a central role in prayer wheel practice as they were seen to absorb the sacredness from the scroll through the rotations of the prayer wheel drum. Consequently, when they broke in two, they did not get thrown away like useless garbage – at least not ideally – but instead had more dignified destinies as they were recycled, exchanged, repurposed, upcycled, stored, cremated, or buried.
Photo by Heng Peng, Lhasa, July 2018.
Knowing that this short article only scratches the surface of the topic. It is our wish to inspire more research into the afterlives of materials used in Buddhist practices, initiated by the project WASTE: Consumption and Buddhism in the age of garbage. We also hope that we can inspire readers to contact us with their observations and photography relating trajectories of prayer wheel wear pads. We will be happy to share your stories and photos on this blog.
Author Biographies
Heng Peng is a Ph.D.-student at the School of History, Sichuan University, and the Department of Chinese Culture, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has done fieldwork in Lhasa, Lhoka, Ngari, and Chengdu since 2016, and has written about population, resources, environment, and sustainable development in Tibet.
Kirsten Skov Vang has a BA in Tibetology and an MA in Cross-Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen. She has spent time volunteering and researching in Nepal. She is particularly interested in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism and monasticism.
Trine Brox is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has written extensively about Tibetan worlds and specialises in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism with topics such as aesthetics, materials and materiality, consumption, and waste.
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