Copper Formless Buddha Spacer

A spacer bead is the punctuation in a bracelet. Once a string has been handled for a long time, the main beads need pieces of a different form between them, or the whole run has no rhythm. That is the job the spacer does: material, size and pattern may all differ from the main beads, and a single one can change the breathing of the whole string, which is far less trouble than restringing it. Nor does the shape have to match — square, round, drum, barrel — as long as the hole lines up.

The idea of the formless Buddha rests on formlessness itself. The Diamond Sutra says that every mark is illusory, and an image made without features, keeping only outline and robe folds, puts that sentence into metal. In cave temples and cliff carvings plenty of niches have weathered until the face is unreadable, and those have come to serve as a model: the face is gone, the form remains. This kind of leaving blank is not laziness in image-making but another sort of care. The term is much used in Chan as well, where it means not clinging to form, and on an image it comes out as a face without features.

Made as a spacer, the formless Buddha is usually in relief on the front only, flat at the back, with the hole running through the middle. The mouth of the hole needs clearance: double strands of elastic should not pass tightly, or the cord kinks sharply at the edge and breaks early. This is the easiest thing to overlook when building a string. You find the hole too small only once it is threaded, so everything comes apart again, and elastic loses its tension after one restringing. Test the hole first; if two strands pass easily, go ahead, because forcing them will split the edge.

With use, copper spacers pick up cord wear around the hole, which is normal. If the string holds South Red, turquoise or other stones of a different hardness, soft washers to either side of the copper reduce knocking. Dust in the crevices comes out with a soft brush; do not pick at it with a needle, since copper is soft and a needle leaves a line that cannot be filled. In summer copper takes fingerprints, which wipe away, and it needs no oil.

There is another advantage to the formless treatment: it commits to no particular figure. Which one you honour, which one you feel drawn to, stays in your own mind and need not be fixed on the bead. That is why many people use it on plain strings — it does not steal the scene and suits any position. On a string of dark wooden beads, a pale copper piece like this marks the division and the eye finds it at once. If the whole string is pale, a darker copper holds it down; the reverse works the same way.