High‐temperature annealing, known as Tabula Rasa (TR), proves to be an effective method for dissolving oxygen precipitate nuclei in n‐Cz silicon and makes this material resistant to temperature‐induced and process‐induced lifetime degradation. Tabula Rasa is especially effective in n‐Cz wafers with oxygen concentration >15 ppma. Vacancies, self‐interstitials, and their aggregates result from TR as a metastable side effect. Temperature‐dependent lifetime spectroscopy reveals that these metastable defects have shallow energy levels ~0.12 eV. Their concentrations strongly depend on the ambient gases during TR because of an offset of the thermal equilibrium between vacancies and self‐interstitials. However, these metastable defects anneal out at typical cell processing temperatures ≥850°C and have little effect on the bulk lifetime of the processed cell structures. Without dissolving built‐in oxygen precipitate nuclei, high‐temperature solar cell processing severely degrades the minority carrier lifetimes to below 0.1 millisecond, while TR‐treated n‐Cz wafers after the cell processing steps exhibit carrier lifetimes above 2.2 milliseconds.