White Copper Golden Light Mantra Ring

Fitting a passage of scripture onto a ring band is a typesetting problem. The band is an arc, the characters have to run right around it, and the beginning and the end are bound to meet. The solution here is a gap left at the join: the text stops, goes all the way around, and picks up again, with the space falling on the inside of the finger where it cannot be seen from outside, so the reading still runs continuously. On a ring with a lot of text, better to leave a gap than to cram.

The Golden Light Spell comes near the front of the daily Daoist recitation. It opens with “Heaven and Earth are the mysterious origin, the ten thousand qi are the root,” and continues, “widely cultivated through ten thousand kalpas, witness my divine power.” The whole spell is not long, the phrasing is even, and much of it falls into four-character beats, which gives it a pulse when recited. Those who teach it say the first lesson is not speed but slowness, holding one phrase at a time until the mind goes quiet; only then has the recitation landed.

The outside of the band is convex, and the characters are cut into that curve, so the graver has to follow the arc for the depth to stay even. The cuts are not deep. A finger passing over them feels a slight drag, nothing that catches. The inside is left flat and polished bright, and over time a bright band wears into it. The edges are rounded off, so nothing presses when the fingers close, and that detail matters more than how handsome the lettering is. A bright interior tells your hand at once whether the work was done carefully.

There is one standard version and one band size. A copper ring cannot be hammered to a new size the way silver can, so measure the finger properly before ordering. Wrap a strip of paper around the base of the finger, note the measurement in millimetres, and check it against the size chart on the page. Fingers differ through the day: they measure large in the evening and small in the morning, and most accurately in the afternoon. The ring has to pass the knuckle. If it will not go on, it is too small. Do not force it, because a ring forced on is harder to get off.

On the hand, a copper ring suffers most from hand-washing. Soap stays in the cuts and becomes a white film within days, which needs a soft brush used dry. Copper against sweat leaves a pale green ring at the base of the finger. Wash it off; it is not anything harmful. In summer, take the ring off at night and wipe it, and a good deal of trouble is avoided. The band is thin, so do not wear it to pry off a bottle cap or shift furniture. One squeeze distorts it, and the lettering goes crooked with it. If your fingers sweat a lot, wear it every other day in summer.