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Yamantaka Mandala



Mandala Teacher's Guide

The Artists

The Buddhist monks who made this mandala spent a month in residence in Minneapolis and invited the public to watch them work. They had a mission. They wanted to educate people about their rich heritage and culture and about their plight since China established Communist rule in Tibet in the 1950s. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's temporal and spiritual ruler, fled to India in 1959, and many Tibetan monastic groups joined him in exile there. During China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Tibet's magnificent monasteries and temples were destroyed. Approximately 1.6 million Tibetans were killed or imprisoned in labor camps, and many were driven into permanent exile. The monks' Minneapolis visit also called attention to a resettlement program that brought many Tibetan refugees to Minnesota

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