an extraordinary event will take place at Carmel River Beach this Saturday, April 24. Khenpo Karten Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama’s principal teaching monks, has been asked to lead Monterey County’s participation in Masaru Emoto’s worldwide ceremony, The Blessing of The Waters.

Rinpoche is currently living in Carmel, through the auspices of flower essence healer Debby Lenz, to spread the teachings of the Amitabha Flower Buddha, which His Holiness The Dalai Lama has asked him to do throughout the world for the next 20 years.

Born in the high Himalayan town of Nangchen, Rinpoche has been a Buddhist monk since the age of 12 and a full-blown Amitabha teaching monk since 35, when his own teacher passed the Amitabha practice on to him. In 1996, he was forced by the Chinese to leave Tibet. He and other refugee monks walked across 550 miles of frozen terrain by night to safety in neighboring Nepal (and then to India).

He teaches to the public at Lenz’s beautiful, unoccupied home at the corner of Martin and Hatton in Carmel, and is available for private visits and questions each night beginning at 7:30pm. This weekend, two special sessions begin Saturday after the blessing and continue Sunday afternoon.

“This is an extraordinarily special occasion, bringing of the Dali Lama’s representatives here,” Lenz says. “The benefits of the teaching and his presence are immeasurable.”

Rinpoche has formerly taught in Boston, Portland, Berkeley and The New York Tibet House with the Buddhist Robert Thurman. He has become so enamored with Carmel and Monterey County that his ambition is to open up a permanent teaching center here, to complement those he has opened in Nepal, Singapore, South India and Abington, Mass.

This Saturday’s event is based on Emoto’s unique experiments with water molecule crystals in his striking The Hidden Messages in Water. The book shows photographs of water crystals frozen on Petri dishes after being exposed to messages such as “Thank you” and “I despise you,” respectively. The loving messages created lovely crystals and the mean vibes, ugly ones.

This work has revolutionized the way both healers and scientists, two groups often at odds, have witnessed the effect of water, which reflects the experiences that it is exposed to, including human emotions, in surprising ways.

Emoto has put his water experiments to work at key environmental locations around the world, including Japan’s deeply polluted “Mother Lake,” Lake Biwa at Fujiwara Dam. In 1999, 350 people gathered to offer a lakeside purification-of-the-waters meditation with Emoto and a Shinto monk. One year later, the cleansing effects in Lake Biwa astonished the Japanese scientific community, who looked carefully for other explanations. Similar experiments have followed.

Now, Emoto has chosen to organize his message and his experiment globally. From 11am to noon in each of the time zones of the world, the blessing will be given by large groups of people standing at the water’s edge, fully cognizant of what we have done to the oceans of the world.

“Everyone is invited,” Lenz says. “It promises to be an extraordinary experience. The connection between our own water systems and those of the oceans is undeniable.

“Masaru Emoto teaches that by meditating on our own purity, we are helping to cleanse the water’s molecules,” she continues. “Having Rinpoche there bringing the presence of the Dalai Lama with him adds to the power of the blessing. We are very fortunate.”

The event will carry additional weight for Rinpoche himself. On April 14, a massive 6.9 earthquake brought devastation to his village only 50 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter. As of this writing, the Tibetans are reporting over 10,000 deaths – in stark contrast to the Chinese government’s “estimated” 1,400. Monks from all over Tibet, still tightly monitored by government, have been rushing into the affected area to help, often to be thwarted by the Chinese army.

Rinpoche remains in constant contact with his village and monks around the world. The effect on him is clear.

“This earthquake comes only two weeks after the Chinese, looking for gold and silver, blasted into this same mountain that Tibetans consider to be the Mother Heart of Tibet,” he says.

Though Rinpoche has not requested it, the blessing will be a chance to donate to his village. Masaru Emoto himself has written about the interconnection between earthquakes and water; the two events seem symbiotic.

THE BLESSING OF THE WATER happens 10:30am-noon Saturday, April 24, at the Carmel River Beach in Carmel. 622-7274, www.khenpokarten.org