One hundred and eight
Malas
In the oldest text that deals with this object, the bead is not the main thing. It is the thread. It stands for the whole that holds everything together, and the beads are the places where it can be counted.
High-jewellery malas from the MXHM atelier in Munich: 108, 54 or 27 positions in gemstones, set in gold or platinum, composed for the person and the phase of their life, over months and together with a medium. No catalogue: every mala begins with a conversation.
The old text
What holds the beads together
There is an Upanishad that deals with nothing but this object. It is called the Akshamalika and is laid out as a conversation: Prajapati asks, Guha answers. What he explains first is not the bead but the thread.
The inner thread of gold stands for the highest, for what lies behind all appearances. On the right runs a thread of silver, on the left one of copper, and they stand for two gods who depend on one another. The upper side of every bead is Sarasvati, the underside Gayatri. The knot is nature. And the hole in every bead, that nothing through which the thread runs, is knowledge.
You do not have to follow this cosmology to see what it says about the construction. The beads are counted stations; the thread is what runs through. A piece of jewellery whose most important part is the invisible one: that is an idea a jeweller does not easily shake off.
The movement, too, is prescribed. The row leads to a larger bead, the guru or meru bead, named after the mountain that is the axis of the world in this cosmology. You do not pass over it. Whoever arrives at it turns the string round and walks the same way back. There is no round that simply carries on. I know of no other piece of jewellery that prescribes a movement to its wearer: a ring sits, a necklace hangs; a mala asks something of you.
The word is made up of japa, the repetition of a mantra, and mala, the garland. The form comes from India and was adopted by Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism alike. The rosary is the same idea, a few centuries later and two thousand kilometres further west.
The number
Why 108
There are several answers to that, and the traditions do not settle on one. Buddhism counts 108 kleshas, those afflictions of the mind that stand between a person and clarity. Hinduism knows 108 Upanishads. The Sanskrit alphabet has 54 letters, each in a masculine and a feminine form: 108 again. Then there are astronomical readings, which are beautiful and hard to prove.
What convinces me is precisely that there is no single answer. A number that stays the same in several cultures independently of one another no longer needs a reason. It is old enough to stand on its own.
For the work in the workshop it has a very practical consequence: there are 108 positions that have to match one another. That is the difference from every other piece I build.
How it came to Europe
A picture from 1982
In India the mala is so old that nobody asks about its beginning any more. It came to Europe as a worn object late, however, and by a very particular route. From 1970 Chandra Mohan Jain, then called “Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh”, gave his disciples a new name at initiation and a mala of 108 wooden beads. Whoever wore it was recognisable; the string was the sign.
Tens of thousands of Europeans, many of them from Germany, went to Poona in the seventies and eighties and later to Oregon. The movement was controversial and has remained so. What counts for us here is something else: for a whole generation this was the first moment in which a mala did not lie in a museum but hung around a neck, and in which it became visible that a necklace can mean something that goes beyond jewellery.
This is exactly where my work begins. Not with the movement, but with the observation: a mala is the only object that is tool, sign and piece of jewellery at once. If that is true, it also deserves the material one gives a piece of jewellery.
La Haute
The story of the first
I had been a jeweller for more than fifteen years, had designed hundreds of pieces and held thousands of stones in my hand, and I felt a quiet dissatisfaction with the surface of my own craft. I wanted to go deeper. I just did not know where.
A coach who was accompanying me through a time of great change said only one sentence after a long walk: “Why not take a look at Buddhist malas.”
The remark did not fall on unprepared ground. Ibiza has been a home to me since my youth, and what has grown there between the hippie legacy and today's spirituality shaped me before I knew it. I have spent weeks in an ashram on Bali. Over years I have watched who wears these strings and what attitude they bring out. The mala fitted none of the drawers I had served as a jeweller until then. That is exactly why it drew me.
I began to research how a mala of the highest quality is made today. The search led through Los Angeles, through Bali, through Nepal, through Ibiza, and ended in Munich, a few minutes away by bicycle. There lives a woman who has been making malas for three decades; not as a craftswoman, but as a person with a deep practice of her own. I went there and rang the bell. She opened the door, looked at me, and the first sentence she said was: “I have been waiting for you.”
For a year we worked on a piece of which neither of us knew at the outset who it was meant for. We gathered the stones over months.
When it was finished I displayed it in the workshop, not to sell it, but to wait. My partner had told me at the beginning: “Believe me, it will find its wearer. She will see the mala, she will put it on, and she will no longer ask what it costs. She will ask why it glows.”
It lay there for half a year. People picked it up, said polite things, put it back. Then one evening a long-standing client was at my home with her husband, a perfectly ordinary evening with no business occasion. The mala was draped, for fun, over a sculptor's bust. She picked it up. She put it on. Then she stood still for a while and said, almost to herself: “Why does this glow like that, and why do I not want to take it off again?”
She has worn it since that hour. My partner had been proved right, almost word for word.
The full story is in my book Schmuck, der Vermögen schafft (Jewellery That Creates Wealth), in the chapter on pieces that find their people.
What it is made of
108 decisions
The base note is set by tanzanite beads, whose blue recalls water. The centrepiece is an amethyst cabochon; on its back, where only the wearer knows it, a mantra is engraved by hand.
To the left and right, two prehnites in their pale green set a calm contrast. Between them lie warm golden tourmalines, faceted, and fine brilliant-cut diamonds set in blackened platinum: white on dark, so that they do not flash but are simply there. The finial is a tassel of finely faceted amethyst beads that moves as you walk.
Every element has a counterpart in the symbolism of the mala. Even so, the piece does not come across as esoteric but as calm. It has weight, in the literal sense and otherwise.
The settings were made by a goldsmith I have worked with for years.
The ten materials
Gemstones are in the text
It is tempting to regard a mala of gemstones as a refinement, as the luxurious version of an essentially modest object. That is a mistake, and the source itself clears it up.
The same Upanishad lists what a mala may be made of. There are ten materials, and in the translations they read: coral or ruby, pearl, rock crystal, shell, silver, gold, sandalwood, the fruit of the putrajiva tree, lotus seed and rudraksha. The threads, it goes on, are to be of gold, silver and copper.
The modest and the precious stand side by side in this list, as equals, and have done for centuries. The sandalwood mala is one of ten possibilities, not the original from which everything else deviates. Whoever builds one from gemstones is doing nothing new and nothing presumptuous. He is choosing from the same list.
What changes is the construction. A mala of wood is strung and knotted; one of gemstones is set. The stones do not touch one another, they sit in metal. That is not luxury but necessity: otherwise stone rubs against stone, and after a few years of daily use you can see it. Set, it may be used, and that is exactly the point.
The text goes on to describe how a mala is consecrated, with milk, with scented pastes, with a mantra for every single bead. That is not my task and not my claim. I build the piece; what happens with it afterwards belongs to the wearer.
The selection
Which stones for which person
Assigning stones to a person is no invention of the present day. Indian astrology knows the Navaratna, the nine stones: ruby for the Sun, pearl for the Moon, red coral for Mars, emerald for Mercury, yellow sapphire for Jupiter, diamond for Venus, blue sapphire for Saturn, hessonite and chrysoberyl cat's eye for the two lunar nodes. They are worn in a fixed arrangement, the ruby in the centre, the other eight around it: as a ring, as a pendant, as a bracelet.
I am not an astrologer and do not pretend to be one. But I work with what people bring. Some come with a birth chart. Some with a clear idea of what they are missing: calm, steadiness, alertness. Some only with a colour that has not left their mind for weeks. All three are a beginning, and all three lead to a different piece.
Most often, though, what stands at the beginning is not a wish but a transition. A chapter that is coming to an end and one that does not yet have a name. A profession that is being laid down. A child moving out. An illness that has been overcome. A country someone is going to or coming from. Almost every mala I have built came into being at such a threshold, and that is no coincidence but the real function of this form: it counts something off and begins again from the start.
That is why I do not ask first about the stone but about the situation in life. What are you coming from, what are you moving towards, and what of the two should the piece carry with it? Someone entering a quiet phase needs something different from someone who is just now changing everything. A piece that comes into being in a crisis looks different from one that marks a beginning, and both are worn for decades, not for months.
For the energetic composition I work together with a medium. That is not an ingredient for the story but part of how I work, ever since the first mala came into being. I select the stones by quality and origin; which of them belong to this one person, the three of us decide together.
What I do not do: promise an effect. I build the piece as well as I can, from stones I can answer for. Whether it is the right one for you, you will notice when you hold it in your hand, not because I tell you so.
The lengths
108, 54, 27
A full mala has 108 beads. But the tradition also knows the divisions: 54 for the half round, which is walked twice, and 27 for the wrist. Neither is a shortcut; both are established forms. The arithmetic works out, and the practice remains the same.
For a piece of jewellery that changes a great deal. A half mala falls shorter and can be worn under a collar. A twenty-seven becomes a bracelet and is therefore the piece one really wears every day, even when a long necklace does not fit.
Both can be added to an existing mala, from the same stones and with the same setting. The pieces then visibly belong together without your owning two identical necklaces.
माला
mālā — garland, row, string
- 108The full round. A necklace that lies across the chest.
- 54The half mala. Walked twice, worn shorter.
- 27The wrist. Walked four times, worn daily.
The 54 length
A half mala
A finished piece that sits in my showroom. Antique aquamarines as rondelles, with green tourmalines: as marquises above the pendant and as the centre, in an emerald cut. Set in platinum, the connecting links set with brilliant-cut diamonds. Instead of a textile tassel hang three strands of aquamarine carrés.
Shorter than a full mala, and so closer to the neck: the length at which a prayer string becomes a piece one wears to dinner.
A second level
108 curated stones
A mala need not remain a purely spiritual piece. It can be deliberately built so that, alongside, it carries the architecture of a gemstone portfolio, and that is not a justification after the fact but a genuine possibility of this form.
The structure is the same as that of a portfolio: at the centre stands a centre stone with its own standing in the collectors' market, an untreated top spinel, a padparadscha, a fine Paraíba. Around it are grouped stones that are either value-holding positions in their own right on a smaller scale or deliberately remain decorative.
The result is an object that carries the function of a small gemstone portfolio within it and is worn, inherited or sold as a unit. 108 positions, each with its own history, only on the body rather than in the safe.
The figures for this are on the page Gemstones as an investment. The sober side is there too: what a portfolio can do and what it cannot.
From the atelier
One piece, four views
A mala for a man. Smoky quartz, onyx and jade, between them rondelles of burnished 18 kt gold: not polished but kept dark, so that the gold steps back and the stones stand in front. At the centre a champagne diamond, emerald cut, flanked by two jade beads; the narrow rondelles beside it are set with champagne diamonds. Built without a tassel, so that it can be worn like a necklace.
Designs
Five directions
The following pictures show no finished pieces but designs. With some of them, however, I am further along than the picture suggests: for several of these directions I have already found the right stones. They are here, waiting for someone to come for whom they are meant.
If one of these directions draws you, tell me. Then we look together at what is already there, and build on from that rather than starting from nothing.
Frequent questions
What I get asked about malas
- What is a mala?
- A prayer and meditation string of 108 beads, plus one larger bead known as the guru or meru bead. The word is made up of japa, the repetition of a mantra, and mala, the garland. It comes from India, where it is documented from the first millennium BCE, and was adopted by Hinduism and Buddhism alike. In the West the same idea is known as the rosary.
- Why 108?
- There are several explanations, and no tradition settles on one. Buddhism names 108 kleshas, afflictions of the mind that are to be overcome. Hinduism counts 108 Upanishads. The Sanskrit alphabet has 54 letters, each in a masculine and a feminine form, which makes 108. And there are astronomical readings that are pretty and hard to prove. I think it is right to leave this open: the number is old, it is the same everywhere, and that is enough.
- Can a mala be worn as jewellery?
- Yes, and it has been for a long time. What matters is that the origin does not disappear. A mala is first a tool and only then a piece of jewellery; turn that round and you get a long necklace with a tassel and nothing else.
- Is a mala made of gemstones not a distortion of the idea?
- No. The Akshamalika Upanishad names ten permitted materials, and coral, ruby, pearl, rock crystal, silver and gold stand there beside sandalwood and rudraksha. The precious has belonged to it for centuries. What changes is the construction: set rather than strung, so that stone does not rub against stone and the piece may be used.
- How long does it take?
- We worked on La Haute for a year, most of that time on the stones. In a mala more than a hundred positions have to match one another, in colour, in size, in transition. That is the real work, and it cannot be hurried.
- Can a mala be an investment?
- It can contain one. The architecture is the same as that of a gemstone portfolio: a centre stone with its own standing in the collectors' market, and around it stones that either hold their value in their own right or deliberately remain decorative. The piece then carries both, the calm of the mala and the value of a curated portfolio, only on the body rather than in the safe.
- Does it have to be a full mala?
- No. The tradition knows the divisions: 54 beads for the half round, which is walked twice, and 27 for the wrist. Both are established forms, not shortcuts. A twenty-seven becomes a bracelet and is therefore often the piece that actually gets worn every day. Both can be added to an existing mala from the same stones.
- How are the stones chosen for me personally?
- In conversation. Some people bring a birth chart; Indian astrology has long assigned nine stones to nine planets, the Navaratna. Some bring an idea of what they are missing, some only a colour. For the energetic composition I work together with a medium; I myself select by quality and origin. I do not promise an effect. I build the piece.
- Is it blessed or consecrated?
- That is not my task and not my claim. I build the piece. What happens with it afterwards belongs to the wearer and her practice. Anyone who wants a consecration will find people who are called to it.
Your mala
How something like this begins
Not with a design and not with a budget, but with a conversation about what the piece is to be there for. Which phase you are in right now and which one is coming to an end. Whether it will be used or worn. Whether it accompanies a practice or a memory. Whether a particular stone should stand at the centre, or a particular colour.
After that the long work begins: the gathering. More than a hundred positions that have to match one another in colour, size and transition. That takes months, sometimes a year, and it cannot be hurried, at least not without the finished piece showing it.
Write to me with what you have in mind. Even if it is not yet a picture, only a sense of what is missing.
Enquiry
Your mala
Let's talk
Every piece begins with a conversation
A first conversation is free of obligation and entirely confidential. In Munich, wherever you are, or online. No catalogue, no sales team.