Shaolin sandalwood mala.

I'm always interested in the old tools like meditation beads. If I don't understand them, sometimes I buy them anyway so I'll have a chance to figure them out spontaneously. Usually you don't need a lot of them--one set of Shaolin beads is enough if you know how it works. Going back to the old ideal of poverty, with a robe and a begging bowl and the few other essentials that aren't mentioned in the popular literature, the mala beads generally squeak by without being noticed.

In some traditions the beads are used to count prayers. I actually don't know anything about that aspect of their use because it doesn't interest me at all. Not a bit. Zip. I've never met anything that cared to be worshiped and I don't expect I will. Beads represent to me a simple way of doing specific ancient mental practices, energy manipulations that make things happen. Beads are tools. There's no inherent power in them and they don't symbolize anything. If anybody wants to look at them differently, that's fine.

I have a sandalwood bead necklace divided into four sections, with equal numbers of beads in each section. Each section has twenty four small beads, and is separated from the next section by a larger bead. One bead in the chain is different, for a practical reason and an esoteric reason. A tassel attaches to it, marking the beginning of the meditation cycle and the last sequence. Use of the necklace isn't obvious. Unless you know the system you won't see it displayed here. In some traditions it's been kept aside as a high level secret, only for adepts who proved their worth.

Many of the old meditations involved visualizations of energy. That's a simplistic way of looking at the practice, since it involved experience of many sensations--emotions, heat and cold, light and dark, and more. To acquire control of those energies, both within and without, adepts built the intensity of the experience with each breath. Energy built in harmony with a specific number of breaths, and energy was released by the same count. Four fundamental energies formed the base of the cycle, with a fifth energy implied. That's the part that isn't apparent in the necklace.

Most of the bracelets and necklaces shown in the widget here are simplified versions of this old training tool. A few have the counting beads that divide the necklaces into segments. The bracelets can be used in the same way, with one round for building energy and one round for releasing it.

Or you could use them to count prayers. To me that's kind of like using a hammer to mark time. You could use it for that, but a hammer is supposed to do something else.