The King, the Seeds, and a Thread That Has Lasted for Twenty-Five Hundred Years

Once upon a time, there was a king named Boliuli.

His kingdom was small, but its problems were many: threats at the borders, illness, hardship among his people. The king sent a messenger to the Buddha to ask for guidance, explaining that he wanted to practice the teachings but that the demands of ruling left him neither the time nor the stability he needed.

The Buddha did not tell him to meditate for at least half an hour a day, nor did he ask him to leave everything behind and follow him on retreat.

Instead, he told him to take 108 seeds from the soapberry tree, string them on a thread, and keep them with him. While walking, sitting, or lying down, he was to move the seeds through his fingers while reciting “Buddha, Dharma, Sangha” — the Buddha, the teaching, the community.

One seed at a time.

This is where the story, read today, begins to feel surprisingly close to us.

That king looks a lot like us, kings and queens of our own small, chaotic, demanding worlds: overwhelmed by real problems, short on time, and carrying a need almost anyone can recognize — something to return to when the mind begins to scatter.

The Buddha does not hand the king a philosophy to study for years. He gives him a repeatable gesture, something the hands can learn and carry into life exactly as it is.

Today, we might also understand that gesture as a somatic anchor: something tangible that brings attention back to the body, to rhythm, to repetition.

Over the centuries, that simple thread of seeds has taken on countless forms. Stones, wood, different seeds, different structures, different traditions — yet the gesture remains strikingly similar: touch, count, repeat, return.

That is the thread running through The Path of the Mala: how such a simple object has moved across centuries and cultures, changing in form and meaning without losing its role as a support for practice.

The Book

In the book, I trace the history of the mala through the traditions that preserved it, the symbols it carries, and the ways such an ancient object can still make sense for someone who, like King Boliuli, does not have thirty minutes a day to meditate but still needs something to return to.

It is not a manual of rigid rules, nor a collection of beliefs to accept on faith. It is an invitation to understand what can make a repeated gesture genuinely supportive — and how to build, one bead at a time, a practice that truly belongs to you.

King Boliuli could not have known that his story would travel this far.

The thread, however, is still the same.