Paper Mala

On and off, I keep up a handful of Buddhist practices like meditation, mantra recitation, sutra chanting, that sort of thing. This month I've committed to 108 repetitions of a mantra every day. 108 is a significant number in Buddhist tradition, and I won't go down that rabbit hole here, but the short version is: I needed a way to keep count.

The traditional tool for this is a mala, a string of 108 beads you hold in your hand and move along one by one until you reach the end. Simple, tactile, and it's been working for practitioners for centuries. I don't own one. They're easy enough to buy, but I'd rather make one myself. There's something that feels right about that for a practice object. I've found some good tutorials and videos, and you can even make beads out of rolled scrap paper if you don't have proper beads on hand. It just takes time I haven't carved out yet.

The other traditional method is knuckle counting, where you work your way across the joints of your fingers in a specific pattern to reach 108. Unfortunately, my ADHD has other plans. I'll lose track somewhere around 30, think about something else entirely, and suddenly I have no idea where I am.

So I needed a stopgap. Something I could use right now, today, while I work up to making the real thing.

Here's what I landed on: 108 dots, drawn in a chain in my notebook. I made them with a purple brush pen, working slowly enough to keep them reasonably even, and arranged them in a spiral starting from the middle of the page. One dot per repetition — I move my pen along as I go, and when I reach the end, I'm done.

It's working out surprisingly well. There's something about the hand-drawn quality of it that feels more personal than an app counter, and more immediate than fumbling with a phone. It's not precious the way a real mala is, but it's mine, it's right there in the notebook I'm already using, and it does exactly what I need it to do.

Sometimes the right tool is the one you can make in five minutes with what you've already got.