materialsSeed and nutरुद्राक्ष

The best-documented one is the rudraksha, the dried stone of Elaeocarpus ganitrus. The tree grows 18 to 24 metres, is evergreen and fast-growing, and puts out buttress roots as it matures; it starts bearing fruit three to four years from germination and then yields between 1,000 and 2,000 fruits a year. The ripe stone sits inside a blue fleshy husk, and the blue is not a pigment but structural colour, which is why the beads are sometimes called blueberry beads. The stones carry ridges called faces — mukha — usually between one and twenty-one, rarely up to twenty-six or twenty-seven, and the count is the grading system: the single-faced ekamukha is the rarest, an eleven-faced bead is worn by renunciants, a married person wears a two-faced bead, and a five-faced bead stands for Hanuman. Nepali beads run 20 to 35 mm, Indonesian ones 5 to 25 mm.

The origin story is an eye. Sage Bhusunda asks Kalagni-Rudra where the beads come from, and the answer given in the late-medieval Upanishads is that Rudra closed his eyes for the destruction of the Tripurasura, drops of water fell from them to the earth, and those tears became rudrakshas. The name is the same claim: rudra, Shiva, and aksha, eye.

The stringing is specified. Beads are commonly strung on silk or on black or red cotton thread, less often on copper, silver or gold wire, and may be damaged if strung too tightly. There is a long tradition of 108 beads plus one — the extra, called the meru, bindu or guru bead, marks the beginning and end of a cycle — with garlands also made as 27+1 and 54+1.

The supply chain is named. Rudraksha are primarily sourced from India, Indonesia and Nepal for jewellery and malas and are valued similarly to semi-precious stones; the popular varieties come from around Kathmandu and the Arun valley in Nepal and from Kulu and Rameshwaram in India, with groves mostly in Uttarakhand and natural trees in the alpine forests of the Dhauladhar and lower Shivalik ranges. There is a dedicated 184-acre grove, the Ch. Devi Lal Rudraksha Vatika in Yamunanagar district, Haryana, which also holds over 400 endangered ayurvedic medicinal herbs. The fruit was studied enough for an alkaloid, rudrakine, to be identified in it in 1979.

Mexico sells a different eye. At the Mercado de Sonora, among the magical and religious plant items, is a seed called deer's eye, sold against the evil eye. China puts seeds on metal instead of stringing them: Chinese marriage charms depict dates and peanuts for reproduction, lotus seeds for continuous births, chestnuts for male offspring and pomegranates for fertility — the seed as a sign cast in bronze rather than as an object worn.

Inference — every date in this record is textual. The Upanishads and the Tirumurai describe the garlands; no excavation dates one, because the cord rots and the beads scatter. A seed charm is durable in the hand and invisible in the ground.

Picked, husked, dried, drilled and strung — on silk, on black or red cotton, or on wire. The Devi Bhagavata Purana sets out the preparation of rudraksha garlands, and one Upanishadic passage lists the permitted materials for the beads of a garland as coral, pearl, crystal, conch, silver, gold, sandal, Putra-Jivika, lotus or rudraksha, bound with golden thread, silver caps on the right and copper on the left, each bead's face meeting the next bead's face and tail meeting tail, in a circle.

Rudraksha are grown as a crop and valued like semi-precious stones, and the cultivation is documented down to named groves and districts. The seed is also the only material in this batch that carries its own quality grading in public — a count of faces, visible on the bead, which a buyer can check and a seller can argue about.