A brief examination of bowls in the Suttapiṭaka:
There’s the mendicant’s alms bowl:
patta
What was it made of? Reading SN 4.16, The Alms Bowls:
At that time several alms bowls were placed in the open air.
Then Māra the Wicked manifested in the form of an ox and approached those bowls.
One of the mendicants said to another, “Mendicant, mendicant, that ox will break the bowls.”
Clearly, then, they were breakable. So I assume they were made of clay – from the earth’s dirt.
In fact, I don’t have to wonder about this at all. From Thag 1.97:
Giving up a valuable bronze bowl,
“Hitvā satapalaṁ kaṁsaṁ,
and a precious golden one, too,
ovaṇṇaṁ satarājikaṁ;
I took a bowl made of clay:
Aggahiṁ mattikāpattaṁ,
this is my second initiation.
Idaṁ dutiyābhisecanan”ti.
Thus:
kaṁsaṁ – a bronze [bowl]
satarājikaṁ – a golden [bowl]
mattikāpattaṁ – a bowl (pattaṁ) made of clay (mattikā)
In John Kelly’s Pali class, he walked us through his translation of Mil 3.3.14:
a bronze bowl
kaṁsathālaṁ
where thāla is another term for “bowl” or “dish”.
Before we leave the more expensive types of bowls, I’ll point out Bhante Sujato’s note in MN 139:
Pātī (“cup”) is from the root √pā , “to drink”, used in Pali for cups of bronze, gold, or silver. | Patta (“bowl”), the masculine form of the same root, is the standard word for a mendicant’s alms bowl.
There’s also Northern Black Polished Ware, which I would include in the “expensive” category (although clearly not as valuable as bronze, gold or silver). I assume Bhante is referring to this type of pottery in SN 21.8 (?):
Then Venerable Nanda—the Buddha’s cousin on his mother’s side—dressed in nicely pressed and ironed robes, applied eyeshadow, and took a polished black bowl.
The pāli text reads acchaṁ pattaṁ, which is literally a glazed or polished bowl. In fact, Bhikhhu Bodhi doesn’t include the word “black” in his translation. So I was quite puzzled until I learned about Northern Black Polished Ware:
Technologically, NBPW is among the finest pottery ever produced not only in ancient India and South Asia, but also one of the best in the entire Old World. Turned on a fast wheel, it was fired in a sagger-kiln at high to very high temperatures and cooled in a reduced atmosphere (Rowson 1953). It is made of fine-grained clay and with almost negligible tempering material. The gloss or surface coating used in the production of NBPW has been addressed through several hypotheses; however, there is hardly any accepted theory about it (Agrawal 2009)
(From Northern Black Polished Ware in Indian Archaeology: A Study of Spatial and Chronological Distribution, Alok Kumar Kanungo, Chinmay Kulkarni, Varad Ingle and Oishi Roy)
Getting back to regular clay bowls, I also confirm a probable clay composition here in AN 9.11:
a bowl of fat
medakathālikaṁ
which is
leaking and oozing from holes and cracks.
Surely only a clay bowl would have holes and cracks. (Note another form of thāla for “dish” above. That give us a dish of fat or medaka.)
Finally, I’d like to share this from DN 6:
the pupil of the wood-bowl ascetic
dārupattikantevāsī
I don’t know why Dārupattika is referred to as someone carrying a wooden bowl. Puzzling.
One last item:
In this photo from an article, you’ll note the wheel in the background with the hand and the bowl-dish in the making. This is proposed to be the method by which the v-shaped bowls (artifacts) were made.
It’s referred to as wheel-shaping or wheel-fashioning. Some scholars think that this type of physical wheel, used for making pottery, pre-dates the wheel used for physical transport. We’ll never know, from what I can tell.
The use of a wheel for making pottery takes advantage of kinetic rotational energy. A handful of us nerds have been talking about wheels and chakras on Bhante’s thread.
All in a day’s work 