Jowo Shakyamuni or Jowo Rinpoche (Wylie jo bo rin po che) is, with Jowo Mikyö Dorje, the most sacred statue in Tibet. Jowo Rinpoche is housed in the Jokhang temple and Jowo Mikyö Dorje in the Ramoche temple in Lhasa.
The Jowo Rinpoche statue has a long history and is said to have been personally blessed by the Buddha. It came to be owned by the king of Magadha, who gave it to a Tang emperor of China. The emperor's daughter, Wenchen Kongjo. carried it to Lhasa via Lhagang in a wooden cart when she married King Songtsen Gampo. During Mangsong Mangtsen's reign (649-676), because of a threat that the Tang Chinese might invade, Princess Wencheng is said to have hidden the statue of Jowo Rinpoche in a secret chamber in the Jokhang. Princess Jincheng, sometime after 710 CE, had it placed in the central chapel of the Jokhang. It was replaced at Ramoche by a statue of Jowo Mikyo Dorje, a small bronze statue of the Buddha when he was eight years old, crafted by Vishvakarman, and brought to Lhasa by the Nepalese queen, Bhrikuti. Jowo Mikyo Dorje have been badly damaged by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.[1][2]
The Ramoche temple was gutted and partially destroyed in the 1960s and the bronze statue disappeared. In 1983 the lower part of it was said to have been found in a Lhasa rubbish tip, and the upper half in Beijing. They have now been joined and the statue is housed in the Ramoche Temple, which was partially restored in 1986,[3] and still showed severe damage in 1993.
These restoration of the Jowo was possible thanks to Ribur Rinpoche (1923-2006), a revered lama who was jailed by the Chinese Army in 1959 for 20 years in Lhasa and was released in 1979 in connection with the liberalization politic of Deng Xiaoping. Ribur Rinpoche was granted with a position at Office of Religious Affairs of Tibet and he aimed at bringing back spiritual sacred treasures taken to China. In 1983, with the help of the 10th Panchen Lama, he could succeed in finding the upper part of Jowo Mikyö Dorje and bring it back to Tibet. Panchen Lama explained to the Chinese how sacred the value of Jowos was for Tibetans and that their response to the quest of Ribur Rinpoche would be a mean to judge the sincerity of the new Chinese religious politic.[4][5]