Across the world, in caves and on mountain peaks, in rivers and in the depths of the ocean, small black stones are being laid to rest. Each one carries the same mantra, micro-engraved into diamond-dark shungite:

Om Ah Hūṃ Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hūṃ

Each one holds within it iron beads, relics, fragments of scripture; each one is an image of Guru Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, the Second Buddha of Vajrayāna, who tamed the wild places of Tibet not by conquering them but by befriending their spirits. The initiative that carries these plaques into the world began under the late Katok Moktsa Rinpoche and continues through his sangha; more than a thousand have now been placed.

It is, at its heart, a very simple act done in a time that badly needs it: to set a blessing into a wounded world, in a mountain, a lake, a sea, and to trust that it will do its work long after the hands that placed it are… gone.

My colleague Alexandru Anton, of the Nyingma lineage, placed one such plaque into the waters of Lake Herăstrău here in Bucharest, some years before we knew each other. Our paths as Dharma practitioners had not yet crossed. It was only later, when our roads finally met, that he entrusted me with the locations of the plaques he himself had placed.

Therefore, I knew a plaque was in that lake, resting somewhere beneath the water, and I thought of it now and then, with devotion.

This year, the drought came. As everywhere else in this world, it was bad here too. Week after week without rain, I watched the lake the way one watches a wound; the waters receded, and receded further, until one day there was simply no more water in Herăstrău at all. I walked its exposed banks and found nothing, and a fear I hadn’t expected settled into me; that the plaque, Alexandru’s offering, might be lost.

Then the phone rang. On the other end, was a man I had never met, an operator on one of the machines the city had sent in to clean the lakebed while the drought made it possible; he had found something heavy, he said, an object bearing the image of a Buddhist deity. He had gone home and searched, and learned that what he was holding in his hands was precious. And then, to his everlasting credit, he did the honorable thing: he called us, and told us to come and take it back.

I did not walk to the meeting place. I flew! I was so overtaken by nerves that I boarded the wrong subway and arrived late, a thing that almost never happens to me!

The man met me with it set carefully aside, as though he had been guarding it, and in a way he had. I have rarely been so glad to shake a stranger’s hand. I offered him a Christian icon in thanks, small recognition for an honesty that asked for nothing in return, and took the plaque of Guru Rinpoche into my own hands at last. I lifted it above my head.

Om Ah Hūṃ Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hūṃ

I walked home that evening beneath a sky that seemed to have been waiting for the occasion; the sunset was the most beautiful I can remember, color after color laid over the horizon like an offering of its own. Whether that was only the sky, or Guru Rinpoche’s own quiet reply, I no longer feel the need to decide.

The plaque sits on my altar now. I have pledged ten thousand mantra recitations before it, and when they are complete I will return it to nature, wherever He shows me the way; He has always shown me the way before.

What has grown in me through this blessed work of attending to the plaques is… unexpected: a devotion to Guru Rinpoche that is deep, and ardent, and profound, a love unlike any I have felt before it.

With love,

Veronica Sonam Drölma