The story of how a long-lost spiritual statuette found its way back to its home in Carmel Valley.

Last Sunday morning, four Buddhist monks from South Korea performed a blessing and dance in Carmel Valley for a knee-high golden statuette of a female bodhisattva goddess named Kwon Yun. She was originally a male god who pre-dated Buddhism in India, and her charge is to hear the cries of the world with compassion.

The statuette stood on the gleaming altar of the Carmel Sambosa (www.carmelsambosa.org), a secluded Korean Buddhist temple near Carmel Valley Ranch. The monks performed Chum An Sik, the two-hour “eye-opening ceremony” they flew across the world to confer. About 90 people, mostly Korean, sat packed on the floor of the temple, awash in the sights of the dancing monks’ flowy garments and gleaming gold statues, and the sounds of hypnotic singing, chanting and primal music. Per custom, the statuette was covered with a cloth, obscuring Kwon Yun’s vision.

The ceremony bestowed the breath of life into the statuette, transforming it from an object into an embodiment of Buddha. When the cloth was raised, Kwon Yun could see that she was home again.

She had been lost a long time.

The Sambosa (“three jewels temple”) is like a hermitage, a spiritual space to share the teachings of the Buddhist Way, or Dharma. When it was built in 1973, on 7.5 pastoral acres near the Carmel River, it was the first of its kind in the U.S.

Sooyeon “Sebi” Lee, a documentary filmmaker and Buddhist, translates for the two monks who live at the Sambosa: Venerable Dae Man Sunim, the abbot and Lee’s teacher; and Un Wol Sunim, the temple supervisor.

“The [Sambosa] has a long history of having revered Zen masters here,” Lee says. “It’s very important for Korean Buddhists.”

The current temple is not the original. That one burned down in a mysterious fire in 1988. The area that was originally the living quarters was converted into the altar and worship space.

It’s an idyllic place for meditation.

Last September, the temple received an email from a retired couple, food critic Susan Bryan and (literal) rocket scientist Frank Adams, who live in Silicon Valley. “They had been having a picnic on Labor Day [at Strawberry Hill] in Golden Gate Park,” Lee says.

SOME FEARED THE DISTURBANCE COULD PROVOKE GHOSTS.

Bryan fills in: “We heard someone say ‘Don’t touch that­ – it might be voodoo!’”

It intrigued the couple, so they looked closer at the object in question, which was propped in the nook of a tree trunk and caked in dirt. They picked it up and saw it was a statuette wrapped in paper. It turned out to be hollow. Inside was a paper scroll with Asian script on it, and gold and jade earrings.

In Tibetan Buddhism, hollow bronze statues are filled with written mantras, relics or jewels to prepare them as vessels for Buddha’s spirit.

They wrapped the statuette in a bread bag and took it to various Asian friends and associates for translation. But they could only ascertain that the writings were in Chinese and Korean holy script, a heart chakra. (Some feared the disturbance of such could provoke ghosts.)

But there was a bit of English written on it, too. An address. They Googled it and the results led to Carmel Sambosa.

“The original Buddha statues on the altar of the temple had burned,” Lee says. “The speculation is that this little bronze [Kwon Yun] was sealed inside one of the bigger Buddhas, so it was protected from the fire.”

Exactly how and when it came to be buried in Golden Gate Park is still a mystery. It was not destroyed or put in the trash. It was buried on top of a secluded hill in the sprawling park, a peaceful plot of land surrounded by trees and commanding a beautiful view of the city – almost as one would bury a loved one.

“[It] was badly damaged,” Lee says. “The temple sent it to Korea for restoration. Whenever you have a Buddha statue restored, you give life to it in an eye-opening ceremony.”

After hearing the news of Kwon Yun’s rediscovery, Abbot Dae Man invited Bryan and Adams, who are liberal Episcopalians, to spend the night at the temple, which they did. They had never been to a Buddhist temple before. They meditated. They came to the March 22 Chum An Sik, too, as honored guests. “It’s been an amazingly loving experience,” Bryan says.

Dae Man Sunim began a 1,000-day meditation in July 2012. He finished it at the lovely and reverent spectacle of the Chum Am Sik. In the days that followed, the abbot – a calm, bald man in a gray robe – could resume his quiet spiritual path: tending the garden and lotus flowers out back, playing with the temple’s German Shepherd Kong Joo (“princess”), meditating and drinking good tea, one of his few earthly pleasures. And reflecting on the auspicious return of the long-lost Kwon Yun.