Rudra Seed Silver bracelet. These Rudraksha beads are from a tree found mostly in the Indian Himalayas, though both Indonesia and Nepal are sources. They have been used in Hindu (and later Buddhist) prayer bead strands since ancient times. The Rudra Seed in the above bracelet is relatively small at approx 8mm diameter, but they can be quite large, up to 15mm across; the surface of the Rudraksha is divided into segments, or “faces”, and the larger seeds can exhibit up to 21 such faces. When they are large, with a large number of faces, they are rare, as valuable as many sem-precious gemstones, sold by weight as any gemstone is.
The five faces of the above Rudraksha beads can be discerned in most of the eight used in the above bracelet.
The above bracelet has been created in Sydney in Sterling Silver, each of the eight segments securely twist-wired. Each Rudraksha is flanked with two old translucent blue glass Maja Pahit beads, excavated in south Java in the late 1900s and dating back to the pre-Islamic period of around the 800s.