Akshamala, is a garland of bead

Bead

A bead is a small, decorative object that is usually pierced for threading or stringing. Beads range in size from under to over in diameter. A pair of beads made from Nassarius sea snail shells, approximately 100,000 years old, are thought to be the earliest known examples of jewellery. Beadwork...

s, made of pearl

Pearl

A pearl is a hard object produced within the soft tissue of a living shelled mollusk. Just like the shell of a mollusk, a pearl is made up of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other...

s, bones, shalagram shila

Sila (murti)

Shila, Shila, Shila, (शिला in Devanagari, in IAST refers to a Vaishnava (Hindu) aniconic representation of Vishnu, in the form of a spherical, usually black-coloured stone found in the sacred river Gandaki....

, dried seeds, berries, or sometimes of skulls. It is the attribute of many gods and deities in Hinduism

Hinduism

Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...

. In general, an Akshamala is composed of fifty beads, corresponding to the characters of Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

 alphabet, the 'garland of bija

Bija

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the Sanskrit term बीज bīja , literally seed, is used as a metaphor for the origin or cause of things and cognate with bindu....

' (Sanskrit: Varnamala). In some cases, it may consist of 81 or 108

108 (number)

108 is the natural number following 107 and preceding 109.- In mathematics :One hundred [and] eight is an abundant number and a semiperfect number...

beads; both are significant numbers in Hinduism.
Akshamala is also a vedantic thesaurus written in Telugu by Late Shri. Mangu Konet Rao (1905-1996).