1964, “where more than ten tulkus under the age of twenty were gathered for thought reform and labour — speciically as butchers and hunters of wild animals. Some of the things learned from the study group became lifelong addiction the tulkus later had trouble shedding.”15

Wang further writes that after 1959, the Chinese communist authorities disrupted religious activities that led to “an entire generation within the monastic community [to] become polluted in their views on religion, [and] a new generation had grown up completely in an atheist environment.”16

On 25 August 1966 the Cultural Revolution was launched in . Two days later, Red Guards from TAR’s teachers’ training college put up posters and handed out lealets ordering the eradication of feudal culture, which listed that all books praising idealism and feudalism should be prohibited; all mani walls, prayer lags and incense burners should be destroyed; no one should recite prayers, circumambulate, prostrate; and that all monasteries and temples apart from those that are protected by the government should be converted for general public use; and monks and nuns should be allowed to marry and that they must engage in productive labour.17 This systematic campaign of destruction was carried across Tibet. The Cultural Revolution reached even a tiny remote village like Rivoche, where the monastery and the 13-story built in the village by Thangtong Gyalpo, the 14th century Tibetan social reformer, were destroyed. Statues were broken down and scriptures burnt. Monks of the monastery were forced to throw the physical remains of Thangtong Gyalpo into the nearby Yarlung Tsangpo River.

In his book Search For Jowo Mikyoe Dorjee, Ribhur , who lived through the Cultural Revolution and underwent struggle sessions and later recovered the statue of Jowo from in 1982, stated that all the scriptures in , Tibet’s holiest shrine, in Lhasa, and other monasteries were burned, and sacred objects were taken away to China either for melting or to be sold to art dealers in black markets outside of China.18 During the Cultural

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