DEV Community: bht99

Yojay in a Changing World: What Remains When Everything Else Moves

bht99 — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:12:23 +0000

Families now span faiths and passports. Young people buy different things from their parents, and belong to more than one place. Almost everything about how we live is moving. Two things are not: everything passes, and we still want to remember and to give. That is where an old Bhutanese practice finds its new meaning — and Bhutan its role as guardian.

Picture a family gathered for a grandmother's funeral. The father carries a Canadian passport; the mother, an Australian one. Their son has settled in Singapore and their daughter in Japan. The father grew up Buddhist, the mother Christian; the children would describe themselves as a little of both, or neither. They have flown in from four countries, and in a few days they will fly out to four again.

At some point, someone asks the question every family eventually asks: how do we remember her?

Fifty years ago, the answer was obvious. There was one village, one faith, one temple or church, one grave. Today that family has no single place to go back to. Its question is still the oldest one there is. Only the ways of answering it have scattered.

A world in motion

The family is not unusual. In 2024 there were 304 million international migrants in the world — nearly double the 154 million of 1990, and about one person in every twenty-seven. Behind each of them is a family spread across borders.

Faith is mixing too. In the United States, almost four in ten people who married since 2010 have a spouse from a different religious group, against fewer than one in five of those who married before 1960. Children of such marriages grow up with two sets of festivals, two sets of prayers, and grandparents in different countries.

For many people, belonging is no longer one thing. A person can be from one place, live in a second, hold the passport of a third, and feel at home in all of them — or in none.

What people want is changing

The things a generation reaches for change too.

Young adults are turning away from what their parents took for granted. In the United States, 62 percent of adults under 35 drink, down from 72 percent two decades ago. Cigarette smoking among school students has fallen to 1.4 percent, the lowest ever recorded. In 1983, 46 percent of American sixteen-year-olds had a driving licence; by 2021, 25 percent did.

What they buy instead is telling. More than 85 billion Pokémon cards had been printed by March 2026, sold in over ninety countries and regions. Young people collect digital art and digital tokens, rare sneakers and limited editions. The objects keep changing. What they share is that they are rarely bought only to be used. They are bought because they carry a story, because they are rare, because other people care about them too — because they mean something.

That is not so far from what an offering has always been.

What does not change

Beneath all the movement, two things have not moved at all.

The first is impermanence. Everything that is born passes. The Buddha taught it as the first of the three marks of existence, but no tradition has ever needed to be told. Parents age, children leave, grandmothers die. No passport exempts anyone.

The second is the instinct to remember, and to give while remembering. Every culture that has ever buried its dead has also found a way to keep giving to them:

In China, families sweep ancestors' graves at Qingming and leave food and offerings.
In Japan, Obon welcomes the spirits of ancestors home with lanterns and offerings at the family altar.
In Mexico, the Día de Muertos fills homes with altars of flowers, food and photographs.
In Jewish tradition, the yahrzeit candle burns for a full day on each anniversary of a death, and charity is given in the name of the one remembered.
In Bhutan, prayers and offerings are made on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and forty-ninth days after a death — butter lamps lit, prayer flags raised, monks asked to remember the departed, charity given — so that the one who has died may pass well into a new life.

These are not the habits of one faith. They are something closer to the definition of being human: we know we will lose each other, and we answer that knowledge by giving. Every major tradition built its greatest institutions on the same impulse.

Where the modern yojay fits

Bhutan's yojay began exactly here. Much of the land the monastic body holds was given, over the centuries, by families who wanted prayers said for their dead — a field offered so that the rites would go on long after the giver was gone.

What has changed is the family doing the giving. It no longer owns a field in Bhutan. It may not live in any one country. But it can still ask for what families have always asked for: that a prayer be said, a lamp lit, a loved one remembered, somewhere that will still be there in fifty years.

The revived yojay is shaped for that family. As Kuensel describes it, devotees anywhere in the world can support rituals and request prayers through a secure, multilingual channel, and receive an acknowledgement of what they have offered. It is voluntary. Its value, Kuensel says, lies in the intention and not the amount. It asks for no passport and no address. It asks only for the wish to remember, and to give.

For the family at the funeral, scattered across four countries, it offers one thing they have lost: a single place where their remembrance is kept.

Bhutan as guardian

A guardian does not own what it keeps. It keeps it for others, faithfully, for longer than any one of them will live.

That is the role Bhutan is placed to play. Its monastic body has existed without a break since the 1620s, under His Holiness the Je Khenpo, in a country whose Constitution protects its religious institutions and keeps them above politics. It has been trusted with the offerings of others before — from a whole nation bringing its gifts to the Zhabdrung, to the custodianship of Swayambhunath in Kathmandu that Nepal placed in Bhutan's hands in 1772. And in 2023, by royal command, it renewed the practice for a world in which the giver may live anywhere.

The world will keep changing. Families will spread further, faiths will mix further, and the things young people want will change again, probably more than once. What will not change is that people die, and that those who love them want to remember them and to give in their name.

In a world where almost everything moves, that is the one thing worth keeping still. Bhutan can be the place where it is kept.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Yojay Around the World: How Other Faiths Made Gifts That Outlive the Giver

bht99 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 03:48:56 +0000

A kitchen in Jerusalem that has cooked every day since 1552. Lamps in a Chola temple fed by thousands of sheep. A hospital in Burgundy kept by its vineyards, a Sikh kitchen that feeds a small city every day, a Chinese clan estate copied for eight centuries. Bhutan's yojay belongs to one of humanity's oldest and most widely shared ideas: a gift given so that it keeps on giving.

Most gifts are used up. Food is eaten, money is spent, a candle burns down. But almost every civilisation that has taken giving seriously has arrived, by its own road, at a second kind of gift: one that is set apart for good, so that it goes on producing for its purpose long after the giver has gone.

Bhutan calls its version yojay — the field offered so that the prayers would be said, generation after generation. The Buddhist world built universities and libraries the same way. What follows is the rest of the family: the same idea, found again in other faiths and other countries, and what it built.

Islam: hold the land, give its fruit

The Islamic tradition dates its version to the Prophet's lifetime. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab had acquired land at Khaybar and asked the Prophet Muhammad what to do with it. The advice became the classic formula: make the property inalienable, and give its profit to charity. The land could never be sold, inherited or given away; its harvest would go to the poor, to relatives, to travellers.

That arrangement is the waqf, and over the following centuries it paid for mosques and schools, public fountains and hospitals, and the wages of the doctors and pharmacists who worked in them. In Fez, around 859, a merchant's daughter named Fatima al-Fihri used her inheritance to found the mosque that became al-Qarawiyyin, which UNESCO and Guinness World Records have described as the oldest continually operating institution of higher learning in the world.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1552, Hürrem Sultan, wife of the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman, endowed a public kitchen. It was said to feed at least five hundred people twice a day. It is still cooking. Its head cook told AramcoWorld in 2021 that more than two hundred families, Muslim and Christian, received food from it every day — and that the wheat soup it serves has been made there "from the beginning until today."

Hinduism: the lamp that never goes out

In the great temples of south India the gift was often to the deity itself, and the temple's walls became its account book.

When the Chola king Rajaraja I consecrated the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur around 1010, he ordered that every grant to it — from the royal family, officers, priests and devotees — be engraved in stone. The inscriptions record a system for keeping the temple's lamps lit forever. Donors gave not oil but animals: for each lamp, ninety-six ewes, or forty-eight cows, or sixteen buffaloes, placed with named shepherds, who in return supplied the ghee every day. The temple's lamps drew on 1,623 cows, 2,563 ewes and 40 buffaloes. Another inscription names more than six hundred people who served the temple — priests, lamp-lighters, musicians, dancers, accountants, potters, tailors — many of them paid in land.

The donor did not give today's flame. The donor created a flock whose milk would light tomorrow's, and the day after.

The same tradition sustains Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh, whose outer walls carry inscriptions from 966 to 1013 CE. Today it is administered under the state's religious endowments law and receives more than sixty thousand pilgrims on an average day.

Christianity: a hospital kept by its vines

Medieval Christianity made the gift into a corporation — the abbey, the college, the hospital — that could own property and outlive every one of its members.

In 1443, at Beaune in Burgundy, the chancellor Nicolas Rolin and his wife Guigone de Salins founded a hospital for the poor. Over the centuries donors gave it vineyards. The Hospices de Beaune still owns about 61 hectares of donated vineyard, and its wine has been sold at a charity auction every November since 1859. The sick, the elderly and orphans have been cared for there, without interruption, from the Middle Ages until today.

In London, Thomas Sutton endowed the Charterhouse in 1611 as an almshouse and school. Four centuries later it is still a home to more than forty older people, known as Brothers — and since 2017, women as well as men.

Sikhism: everyone eats together

Around 1500, Guru Nanak began the langar: a free kitchen, open to everyone, where all sit together on the floor and eat the same food, regardless of religion, caste, gender or wealth. The third Guru, Guru Amar Das, asked every visitor, whatever their caste or class, to eat together in the langar before meeting him.

The langar is sustained entirely by what people give: food, money and above all their own work, offered as seva, selfless service. At the Golden Temple in Amritsar it feeds more than 50,000 people on an ordinary day and over 100,000 at festivals, cooked and served by volunteers — the largest free kitchen in the world. It is the closest living relative of Bhutan's zhabtog: labour given freely as an offering.

China: an estate no one could divide

In 1049 the Song statesman Fan Zhongyan, remembered for his line that a good official should be "the first to worry the worries of all-under-Heaven, and the last to enjoy its joys," bought about 1,000 mu of farmland near his home city of Suzhou and declared it the common property of his clan. Its rents supported the clan's needy members, its schools and its ancestral rites, under written rules he drew up himself.

No descendant could claim a share to sell; every descendant could draw on it in need. Other families copied the idea, first a few and then, from the Ming dynasty on, many; by the Qing, the state was honouring the founders of such estates and passing laws to protect them. The Fan clan's charitable hall still stands on Pingjiang Street in Suzhou.

The modern heirs

The same idea now runs through secular life. The charitable trust, the university endowment and the research foundation are all its descendants. When the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome died in 1936, his will placed his company in trust for medical research; the Wellcome Trust's endowment was £37.6 billion in 2025, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. Bhutan has its own modern heir: the environmental trust fund whose founding director traced its idea, in so many words, to the country's monastery endowments.

What they share

Across all of them, the same few things recur.

The gift is given away for good. It leaves the giver and cannot be taken back or divided among heirs.
It has a named purpose — a lamp, a meal, a prayer, a bed for the sick — and its fruits are spent on that purpose, not the gift itself.
Someone is entrusted with it — a trustee, a temple, an abbey, a clan hall, a monastic body — expected to outlast the giver.
It is written down — in a deed, a charter, a register, or on a temple wall — so that later generations know what was promised.
It rests on trust. None of it works unless people believe the gift will be kept as they intended.

Bhutan's yojay has every one of these. A field was registered to the monastery, not to a caretaker; it could not be reclaimed; it was tied to a ceremony that had to be performed. What makes Bhutan's version distinctive is its scale and its continuity: a whole nation once bringing its offerings to the Zhabdrung, villages that gave their labour, and a monastic body that has kept receiving for four hundred years. In 2023, by royal command, the practice was renewed for a world in which the giver may live anywhere — one more member of an old family, opening its door to those far from home.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Yojay From Abroad: Offering From Afar

bht99 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 04:06:11 +0000

Close to one Bhutanese in ten now lives abroad. Many still keep a place in the devotional life of home — flying back for a volunteer week in Gelephu, sponsoring a chorten, asking relatives to request prayers. The revived yojay gives them a direct way to make an offering from wherever they are. The old land law kept offerings from going out of Bhutan. The revived yojay makes it easy for them to come in, from wherever Bhutanese now live.

In April 2026, about 160 Bhutanese who live in Australia flew home to spend five days clearing land in Gelephu. They were not paid. They came for zhabtog — voluntary service offered for the common good — and for the chance to take part, with their own hands, in something the country was building together.

That trip says a good deal about the Bhutanese who live abroad. They left, but they did not leave home behind.

One in ten

The government's own count puts more than 71,000 Bhutanese living and working abroad; a reconciliation across 112 countries puts the figure nearer 77,000 — close to one citizen in ten. Australia holds the largest community by far. Most are young. Why they went, and what their going means at home, is the subject of The Missing Generation.

Leaving changes what a devotional life looks like. At home, faith is woven into place: the lhakhang in the valley, the rituals for a birth or a death, the lama a family has known for generations. Far from home, those threads run through relatives. A son in Perth asks his mother in Trashigang to request the prayers. A daughter in Calgary sends money home for a family ritual she cannot attend.

Offerings that stay at home

Bhutan's law has long kept religious offerings within the country's own institutions. The Land Act of 1979 said so plainly. Anyone could offer land to a lhakhang, a dratshang or the monk body within the country; anything offered to a religious body outside Bhutan was to be returned, with a fine of double its value. The sacred economy of the country was kept at home.

The revived yojay keeps that principle and makes it easier to meet from abroad. The offering still goes to Bhutan's own monastic body, the Zhung Dratshang. What has changed is that the giver no longer has to be in Bhutan to make it.

What the channel offers

As Kuensel described it in August 2026, a secure, multilingual digital channel now lets devotees anywhere in the world:

support specific rituals,
request prayers and spiritual services,
receive an official acknowledgement of what they have offered, and
keep a record of their offerings over time.

For a Bhutanese abroad, each of those answers a real need. Prayers can be requested directly rather than through a relative. The acknowledgement confirms that the offering was received and recorded. The record means a family's giving — once written, if at all, in a lhakhang's ledger — travels with them.

The Zhung Dratshang keeps spiritual authority over what is offered; its investment arm, Gerab Nyed-Yon, handles the financial management and audit. How that structure works, and why it matters most to those giving from far away, is told in Yojay Today and Yojay and Trust.

The diaspora is already giving

The evidence that Bhutanese abroad want to take part is not hypothetical. It is on the public record from the past two years.

Volunteering. Besides the 160 who flew from Australia for the April volunteer programme, members of the diaspora are among the some 100,000 people expected in Gelephu on 1 November for the raising of the 108 chortens of Project 108 — and those who cannot travel can join by the live webcast at 108.gmc.bt.
Sponsoring. Bhutanese living abroad are among the sponsors of Project 108's chortens. When the crowdfunding closed in August it had drawn offerings from 7,866 people, including Bhutanese abroad and international supporters, totalling Nu 28.37 million and USD 84,651. When the domestic drive closed in August, offerings from abroad remained open.
Investing. In December 2024, His Majesty's National Day address reported that Bhutanese abroad — particularly in Australia, the United States and Canada — had pledged nearly USD 140 million towards the Gelephu airport. It was offered through a ten-year fixed-term deposit for Bhutanese abroad — the first step in financing the airport, before the domestic bond of May 2025.

Investment, service and offering are different acts. Together they describe a community that has kept looking home. What that looks like for families spread across faiths and passports is told in Yojay in a Changing World.

What it means on both sides

For the Zhung Dratshang, the diaspora is a source of support that does not depend on land or on who happens to live in the valley — offerings from a generation that earns in dollars and still cares about the rituals of home.

For the giver, it is something harder to measure. In the Buddhist understanding the benefit of an offering flows to the one who makes it. A Bhutanese nurse in Melbourne who supports a ritual in Punakha is not only helping the monks. She is taking her place, by her own choice, in the collective merit of the community she came from — the same place her grandparents took when they carried butter to the dzong or gave a field so that prayers would be said.

The distance is new. The offering is not.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

108 Chortens in Bhutan: Dochula, Gelephu and a Seventh-Century King

bht99 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 07:01:30 +0000

Bhutan has built its most sacred number into the landscape before. In the seventh century Songtsen Gampo is said to have raised 108 temples across the Himalayas. In 2004 Bhutan raised 108 chortens on the Dochula pass. On 1 November 2026 it raises 108 more, in Gelephu, in a single day. Same number, three very different acts.

Almost every visitor to Bhutan stops at Dochula. The pass on the road from Thimphu to Punakha sits at about 3,100 metres, and on a clear winter morning the Himalayan range lines the northern horizon. In the foreground, on a small hill at the crest, stand 108 chortens.

On 1 November 2026, Bhutan raises another 108 — along the Mau Chhu in Gelephu, in the country's warm south, in a single day. It is the second time in a generation that the country has built its most sacred number into the landscape. And it sits in a tradition much older than either.

The first 108: a king's temples

In the seventh century, the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo is said to have raised 108 temples across the Himalayan world. The tradition tells it as an act of pinning down a great demoness who lay across the land, subduing obstacles so that the Dharma could spread. Two of the temples in that account stand in Bhutan: Kyichu Lhakhang in Paro and Jambay Lhakhang in Bumthang, among the oldest sacred sites in the country.

Kuensel invoked the same precedent when Project 108 was announced. The Gelephu chortens, it wrote, do not set out to compete with that history, but to honour it.

The second 108: Dochula, 2004

The chortens at Dochula are the Druk Wangyal Khangzang Chortens — known locally as the chortens of victory. They were built under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck as a memorial to the Bhutanese soldiers who lost their lives in December 2003. Construction finished in mid-2004, and they were consecrated with religious rites on 19 and 20 June 2004.

Their arrangement is a gathering. The 108 stand in three tiers on a single mound — 45 at the base, 36 in the middle, 27 at the top — around a central chorten, with a path winding up between them. They are red-banded khangzang chortens, each built around a juniper sokshing, the sacred pole at the heart of every chorten. In 2008 the Druk Wangyal Lhakhang was completed beside them to mark a century of the monarchy.

The third 108: Gelephu, 2026

Project 108 takes the same number and lays it out in a completely different shape. Its chortens are Jangchub Chortens — the chorten of enlightenment, one of the eight classical forms — each about fifteen metres tall. Instead of gathering on a hill, they run in a single line along the river, 108 metres apart, for about 11.6 kilometres.

📊 Chart: Project 108 Corridor: 108 Chortens, 108 Metres Apart

And instead of being built over months by craftsmen, they are to be raised in one day by trained teams of soldiers, DeSuups and Gyalsups, after a year in which volunteers cleared the corridor in turns, with the sacred relics inside prepared through the summer by monks at Sarpang Dzong — and some 100,000 people are expected to gather and witness it.

Three acts, side by side

	Songtsen Gampo	Dochula	Gelephu
When	7th century (tradition)	consecrated June 2004	1 November 2026
What	108 temples	108 khangzang chortens around a central chorten	108 Jangchub Chortens
Shape	scattered across the Himalayas	three tiers on one mound: 45, 36, 27	one line, 108 m apart, ~11.6 km
Built by	a king's command	a royal patron and craftsmen	trained teams in a single day, after a year of volunteer work
Offered for	subduing obstacles to the Dharma	memory of soldiers who died in 2003	the wellbeing of all sentient beings

What the shape says

The three are the same number, and the same devotion. What differs is the geometry, and each shape suits its purpose.

Dochula gathers. Its chortens stand close together on a pass that travellers must cross, a single place of remembrance that you walk around and through. It holds a particular moment and the people lost in it.

Gelephu extends. Its chortens are strung along a river valley, at a distance you cannot take in from any one point, raised together by more people than have ever built anything in Bhutan at once. By Kuensel's description, they are offered not for victory or glory, but for the wellbeing of all sentient beings.

A cluster on a mountain pass, and a line along a river. Bhutan's most sacred number, twice in a generation, and each time in the shape of what it was built to hold.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Project 108 Relics: The Zung Inside Every Chorten

bht99 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 02:44:27 +0000

A chorten's white walls are the part everyone sees. The part the tradition values most is sealed inside, where no one will see it again: the zung. For Project 108, monks who might prepare one or two a year are preparing 108 at once, in the heat of Sarpang Dzong.

At two o'clock on the afternoon of 20 August, the power failed inside Sarpang Dzong. Outside it was 32 degrees. Inside, the monks kept working — rolling mantras by hand, preparing the contents of chortens that will not be seen by anyone again once they are sealed.

They were preparing the zung for Project 108: the 108 Jangchub Chortens that are to rise together along the Mau Chhu in Gelephu on 1 November.

What zung is

From the outside, a chorten is white walls, a dome and a spire. In Buddhist tradition that is the lesser part. The zung — the sacred inner substance — is what makes the structure a chorten rather than a building of that shape. It is made up of relics and carefully prepared objects representing the body, speech and mind of enlightened masters.

At its centre stands the sokshing, a specially prepared wooden pole regarded as the chorten's spiritual spine. Everything else is placed around it with care. The monks preparing it describe a chorten without zung as a body without its vital force.

What goes in

For Project 108, the reported contents of each chorten's zung include:

Sacred scriptures and mantras, rolled by hand — thousands a day, from early morning
The sokshing, the central pole
Relics representing the body, speech and mind of enlightened masters
Traditional weapons
Farming implements — axes, hoes and ploughs
Ritual instruments, among them drums and the jaling, the double-reed horn heard in monastery ceremonies

The farming tools are worth a pause. A chorten raised for the wellbeing of all beings carries inside it the instruments of ordinary livelihood — the plough alongside the prayer.

Who prepares it

The Central Monastic Body is responsible for installing the zung in all 108 chortens. The preparation began at Sarpang Dzong on the afternoon of 16 June 2026, immediately after the ground-breaking ceremonies along the corridor. The work is overseen by twenty zung lopons — one from each of the twenty dzongkhags. The relics designated for a single chorten were displayed publicly that day, a rare view of something normally known only to those who prepare it.

The scale is what makes this different. Some of the lopons have spent years preparing relics for private chortens or monastic projects — perhaps one or two in a year. Here they are preparing for 108 at once, to a single deadline, with the tradition itself unchanged: a practice passed down through generations of Buddhist masters for more than four centuries.

The consecration

By late September the preparation was done. Around forty masters of the practice from the Central Monastic Body and other monastic institutions had spent more than four months at Sarpang preparing and rolling the sacred inner materials. At the end of September, with about 99 percent of the zung preparation complete, forty-three masters from Bhutan's meditation centres — among them practitioners from Cheri, the Zhabdrung's first monastery — began a twenty-one-day practice and consecration ceremony over the finished zung, led by the former Drabi Lopen, Sangay Dorji, invoking the blessings that make each chorten, once sealed, a field of merit and an object of offering for all beings. The consecration runs until shortly before the Je Khenpo arrives in Gelephu on 21 October. Devotees were still arriving as it began, BBS reported, with statues, cash, food and sacred objects to be sealed inside as zung — one family had come down from Thimphu with three statues to offer.

The Ringsel

In July, His Holiness the Je Khenpo offered 120 sacred Ringsel to be enshrined in the chortens. Ringsel are small pearl-like relics traditionally held to emerge from the cremated remains of realised masters. They are kept at Sarpang Dzong with the rest of the zung, to be placed inside the chortens before they are sealed.

Offerings from outside the dzong

The zung is not assembled by the monks alone. Contributions have been arriving from devotees and well-wishers in Bhutan and abroad. The Central Monastic Body invites offerings for the zung through three channels: the district Lam Netens, the Drungchens of the Dratshangs and Rabdeys, or the Zhung Dratshang office in Thimphu. It is also working with the Gelephu Mindfulness City's spiritual development office to reach devotees overseas. Offerings of this kind belong to an old Bhutanese practice, yojay.

Why it matters that no one will see it

Almost everything about Project 108 is built to be seen: fifteen-metre chortens in a twelve-kilometre line, raised by tens of thousands of people in a single day. The zung is the exception. Once each chorten is sealed, what was prepared inside it through the summer at Sarpang Dzong will be out of sight for as long as the structure stands.

That is the point of it. The tradition holds that the inner relics matter more than the outer structure, and the monks have spent the months before 1 November on the part of the work that no photograph of the day will show.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Yojay Today: How Bhutan Is Renewing the Offering for a Global Age

bht99 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:23:04 +0000

Three hundred and twenty-seven monasteries. More than nine thousand days of ritual a year. For centuries the fields paid for them. Since 2023 Bhutan has been rebuilding yojay for an age of salaries, towns and devotees on every continent — a Day of Offering, an investment arm, and a channel that lets anyone, anywhere, make an offering to one of the Buddhist world's oldest living monastic institutions.

On any day of the year, somewhere in Bhutan, monks are performing a ritual that someone once asked for. The Zhung Dratshang's monasteries — 327 of them, in all twenty dzongkhags — perform some 9,037 days of ritual a year, as The Bhutanese reported in 2023. For centuries much of that calendar was paid for by fields: land given so that prayers would be said, harvested so that the monks who said them would eat. That story is told in Yojay in Bhutan: Four Hundred Years of Offering.

The fields are no longer being given. The rituals still are performed. What Bhutan has been building since 2023 is the bridge between the two.

2023: a day, and a structure

Three things happened in 2023, within a few months of one another.

The day. On His Majesty The King's instruction, the Central Monastic Body revived the practice of offering and gave it a day. In September 2023, in honour of the birth of Her Royal Highness the Gyalsem, it declared Dratshang Yojay Gi Nyim — the Day of Offering to the Zhung Dratshang. The government made the inaugural offering. When Parliament opened its winter session that October, the Speaker welcomed the revival as a way for young Bhutanese to understand and carry forward the country's culture. Institutions followed: on 11 November 2023, the birth anniversary of His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo, the Royal Civil Service Commission and the civil servants' committee offered Nu 1 million.

The care. On 15 September 2023, at Tashichhodzong, His Holiness the Je Khenpo launched a pension scheme for monks and nuns, with a seed fund of Nu 10 million. It pays Nu 7,360 a month to monastics aged 65 or over with at least ten years' service; 323 of the more than 7,000 registered monks and nuns qualified at the start, and UNICEF helped design the scheme and its financing. It turns the logic of yojay towards the monastics themselves: a fund that looks after those who have spent their lives saying the prayers.

The structure. On 30 April 2023, by Royal Charter, Gerab Nyed-Yon Limited was established to hold and manage the Zhung Dratshang's assets — the land, buildings and investments accumulated over four centuries of offerings. It became operational that October, was registered as a company in December, and in March 2024 received its first transfers of land in Thimphu, Paro, Punakha, Wangdue and Chhukha. Kuensel reported in August 2025 that it had exceeded its targets for 2024.

The system as it now works

Kuensel's account of August 2026, contributed by Dasho Kinley Dorji, sets out how the revived yojay is governed — as a partnership.

The Zhung Dratshang	Gerab Nyed-Yon Limited
Spiritual authority	Professional financial management
Ritual oversight	Investment oversight
Monastic welfare — putting offerings to use	Accounting systems
Stewardship of the offering system	Audit assurance

The monastic body decides what offerings are for and performs the rituals. A professionally run company manages, invests and accounts for what is given. The division is the modern form of something the old Land Act already insisted on: an offering belongs to the institution, not to any individual, and the ritual it was given for must be performed.

From anywhere in the world

The largest change is reach. A field could only be given by someone who owned a field in Bhutan. The revived yojay, as Kuensel describes it, runs on a secure, multilingual digital channel through which devotees anywhere in the world can:

support specific rituals,
request prayers and spiritual services,
receive an official acknowledgement of their offering, and
keep a record of what they have given.

A Bhutanese family in Perth can request prayers in Bhutan without flying home. A devotee in Singapore who has never visited can support a ritual in Bhutan. What once required being present now requires only intention.

Kuensel is careful to say what this is not. Yojay is not to be associated with commercial fundraising campaigns. It remains voluntary; its value is held to lie in the intention, not the amount; and it is made, as it always was, for merit and blessing. What that asks of the institutions receiving it is the subject of its own essay.

Why now

The reasons given are frank. A modern economy creates a need for professional governance, financial accountability and continuity of monastic welfare. Urbanisation and dwindling land endowments call for predictable support. And the young — less bound than their grandparents to unquestioning faith — ask for a clearer account of what an offering means and where it goes. A system that records every offering, acknowledges it and accounts for it answers that question directly.

Bhutan as a centre

There is a larger idea running through all of this. Kuensel's account speaks of the Zhung Dratshang's custodianship of Bhutan's Vajrayana lineage as a spiritual depth that reaches devotees everywhere — and of a royal vision to make yojay a trusted institutional platform.

It is not a new role. In 1772, when Bhutan's Desi relinquished Vijaypur at the request of Prithvi Narayan Shah of Nepal, Bhutan was given, as compensation, custodial rights over Swayambhunath in Kathmandu and its monastic lands — one of the most sacred stupas of the Himalaya placed in Bhutanese keeping.

The evidence that the Buddhist world still looks to Bhutan is recent and public.

November 2025. His Holiness the Je Khenpo conferred full ordination on 265 nuns from fourteen countries — 128 of them from outside Bhutan — during the Global Peace Prayer Festival in Thimphu, which brought together leaders of the Mahayana, Theravāda and Vajrayana traditions. On 20 November, as the new gelongmas walked down Norzin Lam with their bowls, Their Majesties The King and the Gyaltsuen offered the first alms, and hundreds of people lined the street to offer after them.
2026. When the Central Monastic Body invited offerings for the sacred relics of Project 108's chortens, they came from Bhutan and abroad; among the sponsors of the chortens themselves were Bhutanese living overseas and supporters in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

Bhutan is small. What it holds is not: a monastic institution in continuous existence since 1620, in a sovereign country whose Constitution names Buddhism as its spiritual heritage and keeps its religious institutions above politics. For a devotee anywhere who wants an offering to reach a living Vajrayana tradition, and to be sure it is honoured, there are few places in the world that can offer both.

Going forward

The revived yojay is young. Its test will be the one every tradition of giving has faced: whether, year after year, offerings are used as the givers intended. The structure has been built for that — a monastic body that performs the rituals, a company that accounts for the money, a record for every giver.

What it offers the giver has not changed since the Zhabdrung's day. It is the opportunity to take part, by one's own choice, in keeping a four-hundred-year-old institution alive. For the Bhutanese who now live far from home, that opportunity has a particular meaning — the subject of Yojay From Abroad. Why the practice matters even more in a world of scattered families and changing lives is the subject of Yojay in a Changing World.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Project 108 and Zhabtog: 40,000 People, One Purpose, One Day

bht99 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:12:35 +0000

The volunteers on the Mau Chhu on 1 November will not be paid. Monks and farmers, students and retirees, civil servants and Bhutanese flown home from abroad will arrive on the same morning to raise 108 chortens by hand. Bhutan has a word for work offered this way — zhabtog — and Project 108 is its largest expression. What it means for a people to build something together, freely and wholeheartedly.

Most great buildings are remembered by who ordered them and who designed them. The people who actually raised them are usually forgotten — and most of them, through most of history, had little choice about being there.

Project 108 is built the other way round. What matters about it is precisely who comes, and that every one of them chose to.

A word for work given freely

Bhutan has a word for it: zhabtog. It means service offered for the common good — voluntary, unpaid, and undertaken with a spiritual intention. It is labour given the way an offering is given. The effort itself is the gift, and the merit of the finished work is shared by everyone whose hands were in it.

A chorten raised this way is not only a monument. Every stone set by a volunteer is that volunteer's offering. A line of 108 chortens raised by tens of thousands of people is, in that sense, tens of thousands of offerings joined together.

A year of practice

Gelephu has been running on zhabtog since 2025. His Majesty The King has led a series of volunteer programmes to prepare the ground for the Gelephu Mindfulness City, in successive rounds.

When	Volunteers
September 2025	7,050, led by His Majesty
Fourth programme	more than 8,000
February 2026	more than 16,000 — the largest public mobilisation the city had seen; Project 108 announced
April 2026	a five-day programme, including about 160 Bhutanese who flew home from Australia
August 2026	about 3,000, some working on the 108 site itself

Kuensel's headline in February captured the spirit of it: the King and citizens working side by side. Gyalsung trainees have been assigned to the chorten work through the months before the day.

One day, one in twenty

For 1 November itself, close to 40,000 people are needed on and around the structures — about one in twenty of Bhutan's residents. The response has outrun the need. By the evening of 28 September, BBS reported, 68,914 people — Bhutanese and visitors from abroad — had registered to attend the raising, 38,173 men and 30,741 women. Registration for Bhutanese nationals has since been extended to 15 October. The instruction is 300 people to each chorten.

Kuensel's list of who is coming reads like a portrait of the country: monks and farmers, students and retirees, professionals, and members of the diaspora. The sponsors behind the chortens make the same portrait from another side — the Royal Family, monastic institutions, the armed forces, civil servants, businesses, a foresters' welfare fund, retired officials, Bhutanese abroad, and friends of Bhutan in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

What the symbolism is

Three things make the day more than a construction schedule.

It is voluntary. Nobody is ordered to Gelephu, and nobody is paid to be there. In a world where almost all large-scale work is either commanded or bought, forty thousand people giving a day of their labour freely is itself the statement. The Taj Mahal took some 20,000 workers twenty years, and legend — almost certainly untrue — says their hands were cut off at the end. Project 108 asks twice as many people for one day, and asks them freely (the comparison).

It is wholehearted. Zhabtog is undertaken with intention. Volunteers have cleared the corridor in the southern heat, programme after programme; monks at Sarpang Dzong have prepared the sacred relics through the summer, working on through a power cut in 32-degree heat. The work has been done in the spirit of an offering, not a shift.

It is one purpose. A pyramid could be built by teams who never saw one another's work. A single day forces the opposite. Everyone must arrive, work and finish together, or the line is not complete. On the evening of 1 November, all 108 chortens either stand, or they do not — and whether they do depends on each of the forty thousand.

That is the meaning of the words His Majesty spoke in Gelephu: "there is no limit to what we can achieve when we stand together."

An old idea, at a new scale

Buddhist history has seen something like this before. In 743 the Emperor Shōmu of Japan called on the whole country to help build a colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji, and enlisted a travelling monk, Gyōki, to gather support; the temple's records say more than 2.6 million people contributed materials or labour. Those records also note a levy and hardship alongside the offerings.

What Bhutan is attempting is the voluntary version, in a single day: a country small enough that one in twenty of its people can stand on the same riverbank, and close-knit enough that they want to.

How the scale compares with the great monuments of history is set out in Project 108 by the Numbers. Why gathering people at this scale has become so rare almost everywhere is the subject of Great Monuments Today.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Yojay in Bhutan: Four Hundred Years of Offering to the Monastic Body

bht99 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:34:51 +0000

In 1620 the Zhabdrung founded a monastic community of about thirty monks at Cheri. Bhutan has sustained it ever since — with grain and butter, with sons sent to the monastery, with fields given for prayers that would be said long after the giver died. Those fields are written into the country's law. This is the history of yojay in Bhutan, from the Zhabdrung to the land register.

In 1620, four years after he arrived from Tibet, the Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal founded a community of monks at Cheri, in the hills north of present-day Thimphu. It began with about thirty. In 1637 it moved to the new dzong at Punakha, and it has been the Zhung Dratshang — the Central Monastic Body — ever since.

Every one of its four centuries has been paid for by offerings. The word for them in Choekey is yojay. How Bhutan has made them has changed many times. That it has made them has not.

Built into the state

The Zhabdrung did not found a monastery beside a state. He founded the two together. The system he established — the chhoesi, the dual system of religious and secular authority — joined them, and it lasted in that form until the monarchy was established in 1907. Collective support for the monk body was, from the beginning, part of what it meant to be Bhutanese.

The community grew. By one historian's count there were about 360 monks by 1651. The census taken for an enthronement in 1747, which scholars have analysed in detail, lists 560 ordained monks and 101 novices — and seems to count only those of Punakha, Wangdue and Tashichho.

How the monks were fed

For most of Bhutan's history there was little money in the villages, and support came in kind. Households paid their dues to the state mainly in produce — butter, grain, cloth — a system that lasted, in the account of the historians John Ardussi and Karma Ura, until about the 1960s. Much of it fed the dzongs and the monks who lived in them. Other households owed labour instead.

Families also gave their sons. Under the monk tax the Zhabdrung introduced, a family with more than three sons sent one to the monastery, and was exempted from certain other obligations in return. The practice has long since died away. For generations it was one of the ways a Bhutanese family made its offering.

When offerings became dues

The relationship at the root of it all is chöyön — the bond between the one worthy of offerings and the one who gives. The scholar Dorji Penjore has traced what happened to some of those offerings over time. One kind, the blessing offering, began as a voluntary gift of produce to the Zhabdrung or to the monk body. Over the generations it hardened into a fixed yearly due, collected long after its connection to the original gift had faded.

The memory of the original gift survived in ceremony. Bhutan still marks the Traditional Day of Offering — Buelwa Phuewi Nyim — commemorating the day representatives from across the country brought offerings to the Zhabdrung at Punakha. School textbooks describe what each region brought: rice from the west, textiles from the east, butter and cheese from the north, betel from the south. A whole country, arriving with what it had.

The fields that paid for prayers

The most lasting offerings were land. The Central Monastic Body described what happened to it: land offered by the people was cultivated, and the grain distributed among the monasteries to feed the monks.

The scale of it can still be seen in Punakha, the monastic body's winter seat since 1637. Kuensel reported in 2013 that rice farmers from eleven of the dzongkhag's gewogs cultivated more than 800 acres of wetland belonging to the dratshang, as sharecroppers — land that, in the old days, people had offered to lhakhangs, goendeys and dratshangs so that rituals would be performed.

Each field came with a purpose. As The Bhutanese reported in 2023, much of the land the Zhung Dratshang holds was, over the centuries, yojay land — given by people who wanted the monastic body to perform their last rites and prayers, or offered during religious teachings. Each plot, the paper noted, had a story of its own. Over time those fields became the revenue from which the monastic body paid for its rituals. A family's offering of a field for prayers after a death became, generation after generation, the rice for the monks who said them.

Offerings of labour

Not every offering was a field. Some were service, promised by whole villages and handed down through families.

On 30 September 1856, after his campaign against British India, the Trongsa Penlop Jigme Namgyel — father of Bhutan's first King — issued a royal kasho for Yongla Goenpa in Pemagatshel. Five villages, Pangkhar, Pangthang Daza, Khaeri Goenpa, Tshelingor and Rimung, were relieved of their labour contribution to the government, on one condition: they must serve Yongla Goenpa instead. The history of the goenpa, preserved by Lopon Dozang in a 132-page account, records the edict alongside the lams who kept the monastery.

At Choeten Kora in Trashiyangtse, the great stupa was kept white by around 66 households, the Lamai Drapa, under the lama of Rigsum Goenpa at Bumdeling. Towards the end of every eleventh month, lay monks went up to Langmola to gather limestone, which was burnt into lime for the whitewashing. The practice lapsed for about thirty years. In 2022, Kuensel reported, the choeten was whitewashed again in the traditional way.

Written into the law

Bhutan did not leave this to custom. When it codified its land law, it gave religious offerings a chapter of their own.

The Land Act of 1979, building on the Thrimzhung Chhenmo of 1957, devotes its Chapter XIII to the procedure for donating land for religious purposes. As its English text sets them out — the Act was written in Dzongkha, which remains the authoritative version — its rules read like a charter for yojay:

Anyone may offer land to a lhakhang, goenkhang, dratshang, goendey or the monk body within the country. An offering to a religious body outside Bhutan had to be returned, with a fine of double its value.
The court checks the gift. Before land is offered, the donor informs the Thrimkhang, which confirms that the land is not disputed and that the offering is proper. Jointly owned land cannot be given without the other owners' consent.
The land is tied to a purpose. Offered land is meant for performing a specific religious ceremony, and the record should state the number of days and the time at which it is to be performed.
It belongs to the institution, not a person. It is registered in the name of the lhakhang or monastic body, never of an individual caretaker.
It cannot be taken back. Once registered, a gift cannot be reclaimed without a royal kasho.
The prayers must be said. Whoever looks after the land must perform the ceremony it was given for; a caretaker who fails is fined the value of the produce and must still perform it.

The same Act brought the separate land registers that monasteries and lhakhangs had kept into the national register, and it uses the term Theptsa Yojay for grazing land registered to lhakhangs.

The Land Act of 2007, which replaced it, carries the principles forward, with distinct rules for different holders. The Gerab Dratshang — the Zhung Dratshang and the Rabdeys — and religious institutions recognised by law may both own land, registered to the institution or its traditional lineage rather than an individual. The Gerab Dratshang, like community land held for religious purposes, is exempt from the ceiling on holdings. Its land may not be sold, though it may be surrendered to the government, exchanged, mortgaged or leased; the land of other religious institutions may only be surrendered or exchanged; and the state is to avoid acquiring land on which religious monuments stand. The Religious Organizations Act of the same year adds that anyone may offer property as a religious endowment, that every donation must be recorded, and that offerings may be collected only by the giver's own will — never by coercion.

The twentieth century: a subsidy, then a Constitution

As the economy moved from produce to money, and taxes in kind came to an end, the state took over much of what the villages had once provided. By 1991 a Library of Congress study could describe the monk body as having long been supported through annual government subsidies.

The National Assembly's records show the state taking on the old role of the giver. In 1970 the Assembly called on the monastic bodies to find suitable land and report back to the government, which would purchase the same for them — with help from the development ministry for irrigation canals. In 1985, when members raised the irrigation channels of the monk bodies, His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo commanded that the cost of irrigation works on monastic land could be borne by the Royal Government. In 1984 His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo established the Dratshang Lhentshog, the council that governs monastic affairs under His Holiness the Je Khenpo.

The Constitution of 2008 made the commitment permanent. It names Buddhism as Bhutan's spiritual heritage, keeps religious institutions above politics, and provides that the Zhung Dratshang and the Rabdeys shall continue to receive adequate funds and other facilities from the State. Four centuries after the Zhabdrung, the nation's support for the monk body is written into its highest law.

The old form of the offering survived alongside it. When Wangdue Phodrang Dzong burned in June 2012, His Majesty The King granted Nu 200 million to the Zhung Dratshang for its reconstruction — Nu 100 million from the Armed Forces and Nu 100 million from the Kidu Foundation. The royal edict said he made the grant on behalf of the people of the twenty dzongkhags: a whole country, once again, making one offering.

What was fading

The state's support made the monastic body secure. It also, gradually, made the people's own offering less visible. By 2023 the Central Monastic Body acknowledged that younger Bhutanese were largely unaware of the practice. Fields were no longer being given; families were moving to towns.

That is where the story of yojay turns from history to the present. In 2023, on His Majesty's command, it was revived — and given a form meant for a country of towns, salaries and families spread across the world. That is the subject of Yojay Today. How Bhutan's practice compares with offerings across Asia is told in What Two Thousand Years of Offerings Built.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Project 108 by the Numbers: How Big Is 108 Chortens in a Day?

bht99 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:48:21 +0000

About 40,000 people — close to the estimated peak workforce of the Great Pyramid, for one day instead of twenty-six years. One Bhutanese in twenty, which in America would be seventeen million people. Eleven and a half kilometres of chortens. Put against the great building projects of history, Project 108's scale is not in its height. It is in its time, and its people.

A single fifteen-metre chorten is not, by itself, a large building. Bhutan has many. What makes Project 108 unusual is not the size of any one structure but what happens when you multiply it — by 108, by tens of thousands of people, and then divide it all into one day.

The numbers, on their own

Measure	Project 108
Chortens	108 Jangchub Chortens
Height	about 15 metres each — roughly a five-storey building
Spacing	108 metres apart, in one line
Length of the line	107 intervals × 108 m = about 11.6 km
Time	one day — 1 November 2026
Volunteers	300 per chorten by instruction (32,400); close to 40,000 expected in all
Registered to attend, 28 September	68,914
Cost	about USD 200,000 a chorten — about USD 21.6 million in all

Some of those numbers become clearer set side by side with something familiar.

Height. Stack the 108 chortens on top of one another and they would reach about 1,620 metres — nearly twice the height of the Burj Khalifa.
Length. The line is almost three times the length of New York's Central Park.
Money. USD 21.6 million across Bhutan's population of under 800,000 is about USD 27 for every person in the country — raised largely through sponsorship and offerings, from Bhutan and abroad.

The people: one in twenty

Bhutan's population is under 800,000. Forty thousand people is about five per cent of it — about one in twenty of the people who live in Bhutan, in one place, on one day.

The same share of other countries would be:

Country	5 per cent of the population
United Kingdom	about 3.5 million people
Japan	about 6 million
United States	about 17 million
India	about 70 million

Few countries could even ask a twentieth of their people to build something together on a single day. At Bhutan's scale, it is possible to ask. The answer is what makes it real. By 28 September, 68,914 people had registered to attend — a number equal to nearly nine per cent of Bhutan's population, though it includes visitors from abroad.

The time: one day against the centuries

The comparison that most sets Project 108 apart is time. The great sacred monuments of the world were built across generations.

📊 Chart: Great Monuments Build Time: One Day Against the Centuries

The Great Pyramid of Giza took about 26 years, around 2600 BCE, with a workforce estimated to have peaked near 40,000 — the same number Project 108 expects for a single day.
The Taj Mahal took some 20,000 artisans and labourers, from 1632 until the complex was finished in 1653.
Tōdai-ji's Great Buddha in Nara took nine years, 743 to 752. The temple's records say more than 2.6 million people contributed rice, timber, metal, cloth or labour — the closest historical parallel to a sacred building raised by a whole population's offerings.
Angkor Wat took about 28 years; Borobudur, built in stages, about half a century.
Dochula's 108 chortens, Bhutan's own precedent, rose in about six months in 2004.

The Great Pyramid: twenty-six years of toil

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BCE, is the benchmark every monument is measured against. It took about 26 years. It is made of some 2.3 million blocks — about six million tonnes of stone — and it rose to 146.6 metres, which made it the tallest structure built by human hands for more than 3,700 years.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing two thousand years later, claimed it took gangs of 100,000 men, working in three-month shifts, twenty years. Modern estimates are smaller: one construction study put the average workforce at about 13,200, peaking near 40,000 — almost exactly the number expected on the Mau Chhu on 1 November.

What that work meant in human terms is recorded in the oldest inscribed papyri ever found. The Diary of Merer, discovered in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, is the logbook of an inspector who, in the 26th year of Khufu's reign, commanded some forty boatmen hauling limestone from the quarries at Tura to Giza: about thirty blocks of two to three tonnes every ten days, month after month. Multiply that crew by the length of the project and the scale of the toil comes into view.

The popular image of slaves under the whip is not what archaeology shows. Excavations of the workers' town at Giza found bakeries, breweries and kitchens — bread, beef and fish were staples — along with a hospital, and the workers were buried in tombs beside the pyramids with bread and beer for the afterlife. They were organised, fed and cared for. But they were also labour owed to a king, working in rotating crews for a quarter of a century on a monument that bore his name, not theirs.

Project 108 asks the same number of people for one day, and asks nothing of them but that they come.

The Great Wall: two thousand years of conscripts

If the Pyramid is the measure of one reign's labour, the Great Wall of China is the measure of an empire's. It was not built once. The earliest walls date to the seventh century BCE; the stretches most visitors walk today are Ming, built and rebuilt between 1368 and 1644. From first to last, the building went on for more than two thousand years, and a 2012 survey put the length of what survives at about 21,000 kilometres.

Its most famous phase came in about 221 BCE, when Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, sent his general Meng Tian north with an army of 300,000 to drive back the Xiongnu and join the older walls into one. Soldiers, convicts and conscripted peasants did the work. Estimates of how many died building the wall across its history run as high as 400,000; the story that their bodies were sealed inside it is legend.

Chinese memory kept the cost in a folktale. In the story of Meng Jiangnü, one of China's Four Great Folktales, a young wife's husband is conscripted to build the wall and dies there; when she learns of it, her weeping is so great that a section of the wall collapses, revealing his bones.

Numbers on that scale stop meaning anything. So imagine, instead, being born beside the wall.

You are a child in a village in the north. Every morning you watch your grandfather leave for the wall. Your father goes with him. Some years later your elder brother goes too, and one day it is your turn. The wall was there before your grandfather was born, and it will still be unfinished when you die. Your parents die building it. You know that you will die building it. No one tells you this is unusual, because no one you have ever known has lived any other way. You probably think this is simply what life is.

Now imagine a child in Gelephu on the morning of 1 November 2026.

She watches her grandfather set out for the river before dawn. Her father goes with him, and her elder brother, and this year she is old enough to carry water. They work beside monks and farmers, civil servants and strangers who have flown in from Perth. By evening a chorten stands where there was bare ground in the morning, and they walk home together. No one ordered them to go. No one will ask them to go back tomorrow. For the rest of her life, whenever she passes that line of chortens along the Mau Chhu, she will know that one of them rose partly under her family's hands.

The wall was raised by those who could not refuse. The 108 chortens will be raised in a day by those who asked to come. Why that single day is the whole point is told in Project 108 in One Day.

The Taj Mahal, and the legend of the hands

No monument shows the contrast more sharply than the Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan's tomb for his wife took some 20,000 workers about twenty years. And it carries one of the most repeated stories in the history of building: that when the work was done, the emperor had the builders' hands cut off, so that nothing so beautiful could ever be made again.

The story is almost certainly a legend. No contemporary record supports it, and the architect credited with the Taj, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, went on to lay out the Red Fort at Delhi. But the legend has lasted for centuries because it captures something true about how the great monuments of the past were made: they belonged to the one who commanded them, not to the hands that built them.

Project 108 inverts every part of that story. Twice the Taj's workforce, for one day instead of twenty years; no one commanded, no one paid; and the merit of the work is held to belong to every pair of hands that raises it.

Daily Bhutan made the pyramid comparison itself in May: forty thousand volunteers in a day, against a pyramid workforce over decades.

What has been built in a day

One-day building is not unknown — at the scale of a family or a village. In Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, a barn raising still puts up a barn in a day or two, after weeks of preparation, with every able-bodied member of the community expected to come. Habitat for Humanity teams have raced to build a house in under four hours.

Project 108 takes that idea — careful preparation, then everyone at once — and applies it at the scale of a nation. The preparation has taken most of 2026: the corridor walked in March, the ground blessed at all 108 sites in June, the relics prepared at Sarpang Dzong through the summer, the volunteer programmes clearing the land in turns. The day itself is the barn raising.

What the scale is really measuring

A pyramid measures what a state could command. A cathedral measures what a city could sustain over generations. Project 108 measures something else: how many people will come, freely, on the same morning, for the same purpose.

That is the part that cannot be bought or ordered, and the subject of Project 108 and Zhabtog: 40,000 People, One Purpose. The plan itself is set out in Project 108: The Plan and the Vision.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Buddhist Alms Giving: What Two Thousand Years of Offerings Built

bht99 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 01:31:18 +0000

A university that fed thousands of monks on the harvest of two hundred villages. The oldest dated printed book in the world. Eighty thousand woodblocks carved to hold a canon. Widespread male literacy in colonial Burma. None of it was built by a market or ordered by a tax alone. It was built by people giving to monastic communities — the practice Bhutan calls yojay.

The Buddha's community owned almost nothing. Its members gave up property when they took their vows and lived on what others chose to give them. The teaching that made this work is called dāna — generosity — and it turns the transaction around: the one who gives is the one who benefits, because giving earns merit. The monk holds out the bowl so that others may give.

That idea sounds small. Over two and a half thousand years it built some of the most remarkable institutions in Asia. Bhutan's word for it is yojay, and before looking at what yojay has meant at home, it is worth seeing the company it keeps.

India: a grove paved with gold, and a gift that never ran out

The first great offering in Buddhist memory was a garden. The merchant Anāthapiṇḍika — the name means "one who gives alms to the unprotected" — wanted to give the Buddha a place to stay near Shravasti, and chose the grove of Prince Jeta. The prince, not wishing to sell, named a price he thought no one would pay: cover the ground with coins. The merchant began to do it. Moved by his resolve, and wanting a share in the merit, Jeta gave the last of the land himself and built its gateway. The Jetavana became the place where the Buddha spent nineteen of his forty-five rainy-season retreats — more than anywhere else.

Some six centuries later, a gift at the Nasik caves in western India shows the idea taking a form that could outlast its giver. Around 120 CE Uṣavadāta, son-in-law of the ruler Nahapāna, gave a cave to the monks, and with it 3,000 kārṣāpaṇas placed with two weavers' guilds in the town of Govardhana — 2,000 with one and 1,000 with the other, at fixed monthly interest. The weavers kept the capital working in their trade; the interest paid for the robes and needs of twenty monks living in the cave. The terms were carved into the rock, where they can still be read.

It is one of the earliest recorded endowment funds anywhere: not a gift to be spent, but a gift that went on giving.

Nalanda: a university fed by villages

For about eight centuries, from its founding around 427 CE under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I until its destruction around 1200, Nalanda in present-day Bihar was the greatest centre of Buddhist learning in the world. Students came from across Asia to study there.

It ran on offerings. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who studied there in the 630s, recorded that the king had granted it the revenues of about 100 villages, whose households sent rice, butter and milk every day. Yijing, who spent about ten years there later in the same century, put the number at 200 villages. The monastery did not farm or trade. The surrounding countryside kept thousands of monks and teachers free to study, teach and copy texts — for longer than most universities today have existed. Its ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sri Lanka: the canon written down

In Sri Lanka, King Devanampiya Tissa founded the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura in the third century BCE, and royal patronage sustained it for more than a thousand years. The pilgrim Faxian found about 3,000 monks there around 400 CE.

Its greatest service was preservation. For centuries the Buddha's teachings had been carried orally, memorised and recited. In the first century BCE, during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya and amid famine and war, the monks — according to the Sri Lankan chronicles — committed the canon to writing at the Aluvihare monastery. The Pali Canon that Theravāda Buddhists read today descends from that act. A community that the laity kept alive in hard years kept the teaching alive in turn.

Japan: 2.6 million contributors and a Great Buddha

In 743 the Emperor Shōmu issued an edict calling on the whole country to help build a colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji in Nara. He enlisted the monk Gyōki, who travelled the provinces raising contributions. The temple's own records say more than 2.6 million people gave rice, timber, metal, cloth or labour. The statue was consecrated in 752 before a reported 10,000 monks, and Tōdai-ji is today part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, a World Heritage Site.

The record is honest about its costs: a special levy was also raised, and the chronicles note the hardship the building caused. That is worth remembering. What distinguishes the tradition at its best is that the giving is voluntary.

China: the oldest dated printed book

At Dunhuang, on the Silk Road, patrons of every kind — monks, local rulers, merchants, officers, lay associations — paid over a thousand years for some 500 cave temples at Mogao, painted and filled with sculpture. Sealed inside one of them, the Library Cave, were about 50,000 documents.

One of them is the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest complete printed book in the world that carries a date. Its closing line records why it exists: a man named Wang Jie had it made for free distribution, on behalf of his two parents. It was an act of merit. The earliest dated printed book survives because someone gave a teaching away. It is now in the British Library.

Korea: eighty thousand woodblocks

In the thirteenth century, under Mongol invasion, the Goryeo court and its patrons undertook to carve the entire Buddhist canon onto wooden printing blocks — a work of devotion seeking protection for the country. The result, the Tripitaka Koreana, runs to more than 80,000 blocks, carved over roughly sixteen years. It has been kept at Haeinsa temple since 1398, in storage halls so well designed that the wood has survived for almost eight centuries. UNESCO lists the halls as World Heritage and the blocks in its Memory of the World register.

Thailand and Myanmar: the monastery as school

In the Theravāda countries the daily alms round — monks walking at dawn with their bowls, households filling them — sustained something as valuable as any monument: literacy.

In Myanmar the word kyaung means both monastery and school. Boys learned to read and write from monks, in monasteries that villages fed. When the 1901 Census of India measured literacy, it found 60.3 per cent of Burmese Buddhist men over twenty could read, against about ten per cent across British India. In Thailand, temples were the country's main schools for more than seven centuries, and when King Chulalongkorn built a national primary system in 1898 he built it on the wats, with monks as village teachers.

Tibet: the great monasteries

In Tibet the relationship between lama and patron took a formal name, chöyön: the one worthy of offerings, and the one who gives. The great monastic universities it sustained reached a scale unmatched anywhere. Drepung, near Lhasa, held about 7,700 monks when a British visitor recorded it in the 1930s — sometimes as many as 10,000 — which he believed made it the largest monastery in the world.

A parallel beyond Buddhism

The idea of the gift that keeps giving is not only Buddhist. Islam's waqf, the perpetual lamps of Hindu temples, Christian hospitals kept by their vineyards, the Sikh langar and China's clan charitable estates all reached it by their own roads — the subject of Yojay Around the World.

What the pattern shows

Across these cases the same three things recur.

At its best, the giving was voluntary and devotional. Not all of it was: royal grants assigned village revenues, and Tōdai-ji raised a levy alongside its offerings. But the tradition's ideal — and the offering people made of their own will — was a gift, not a purchase.

It was pooled and endured. A village's rice or a king's land grant kept an institution alive for centuries, long after any single donor.

What it produced served everyone. A preserved canon, a printed book, a school, a university — the returns went far beyond the monks who received the offering.

Bhutan's yojay belongs to this family. How it took shape in Bhutan — from the Zhabdrung to the land that fed the monks — is the subject of Yojay in Bhutan: Four Hundred Years of Offering.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Gelephu Nation Building Bond: One in Twenty-Two Bhutanese Invested in the Nation

bht99 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 02:06:31 +0000

It targeted Nu 2 billion and closed at Nu 3.347 billion. Measured against the size of the country, it reached one Bhutanese in every twenty-two, from all twenty dzongkhags — more than four times the share of Hong Kong's population that bought its first Silver Bond — and brought more than 18,000 people into a capital market for the first time. The runway is the visible product. What the bond revealed about the country is the one that matters.

On the first day, Friday 2 May 2025, 230 people put in Nu 18 million. That is a modest opening for a bond with a Nu 2 billion target and a thirty-day window, and anyone watching the Royal Securities Exchange's new online portal that evening could have been forgiven for expecting a slow month.

By the evening of 30 May, the day before the window was due to close, the count was 24,040 subscribers and Nu 2.36 billion — already past the target. The issuer extended by three days. By 1 June it was 31,105 subscribers and Nu 2.96 billion. When the Gelephu Nation Building Bond finally closed on 3 June, it had raised Nu 3.347 billion from 35,403 people: the target beaten by two-thirds, and the most widely subscribed debt issue in Bhutan's history.

📊 Chart: Gelephu Bond Subscriptions: Nu 3.35 Billion Raised

The runway those ngultrum are building is the visible product. This essay is about the less visible one.

One in twenty-two

Measured against the size of the country, the response is remarkable.

Bhutan's population in 2025 was projected at about 784,000. The bond's 35,403 subscribers were one resident in every twenty-two — about 4.5 percent of the whole population, children included, and a larger share of its adults. Together they lent Nu 3.347 billion: about Nu 4,270 for every man, woman and child in the country, or some 1.2 percent of a year's national output. The average subscriber put in about Nu 94,500 — roughly a quarter of the country's annual output per person.

Scaled to larger countries, the same response would look like this:

If the same share of the population had subscribed in…	Subscribers
India (about 1.45 billion people)	about 65 million
the United States (about 340 million)	about 15 million
Australia (about 27 million)	about 1.2 million

The fairest comparison is with other bonds sold to ordinary savers. Hong Kong's Silver Bond, a government bond for older residents, is among the most popular retail bonds in Asia. Its first issue, in 2016, drew about 70,000 applications — around one percent of Hong Kong's population — and raised HK$3 billion, about a tenth of one percent of the economy. Repeated issues have since built it up: its eleventh batch drew about 476,700 applications, some six percent of the population. Bhutan's bond, at its first attempt, reached more than four times the share of the population that Hong Kong's first Silver Bond did, and raised about ten times as much relative to the economy — as a ten-year bond from a new corporation, rather than a short-dated government bond.

Only wartime reliably goes further. America's Fourth Liberty Loan of 1918, sold as a patriotic duty in the last weeks of the First World War, drew 22.8 million subscribers, about a fifth of the population. Bhutan's bond came with no such emergency. It asked people to help build something, and one in twenty-two answered.

Comparable records are scattered, and a small country somewhere may have done better. We have not found a peacetime first issue, sold only to individuals, that reached a larger share of its people.

What was actually sold

The terms were simple enough to fit on a poster, and mostly did. Ten-year bonds at a face value of Nu 1,000, minimum ten units, no maximum. A 10 percent annual coupon, exempt from personal income tax. No early redemption, and an initial lock-in before the bonds can be traded. Listing on the exchange, with secondary trading confined to individuals — the bond cannot be sold on to an institution. The issuer, the Gelephu Investment and Development Corporation, is wholly owned by the Gelephu Mindfulness City Authority and was created by Royal Charter to raise money for the city's core infrastructure; the proceeds are earmarked for the Gelephu International Airport.

Two design choices deserve more attention than they got.

Equal allocation, smallest orders first. Because the issue was oversubscribed, not everyone could get what they asked for. The exchange's rule was to fill the minimum Nu 10,000 orders in full first, then the Nu 20,000 orders, and so on upward, with time priority breaking ties. The effect is that a farmer in Zhemgang who put in the minimum was made whole before a Thimphu professional who put in a million. That is the opposite of how most oversubscribed issues allocate, and it is why the subscriber count is the headline rather than the average ticket.

Retail only, all the way down. Institutions could not subscribe and cannot buy in the secondary market. The bond will spend its whole life in the hands of individuals. That forecloses the usual pattern in which a "people's bond" is quietly absorbed by the banks and insurers within a year of issue.

The rail that did not exist before

Here is the part that will outlast the airport.

Before May 2025, buying a security in Bhutan meant a broker, a form and office hours. The GNBB was the first issue sold through the exchange's online primary platform and the first tied to National Digital Identity — the same NDI most citizens had used, if at all, to log in to a government service. Of the Nu 2.36 billion in by 30 May, Nu 1.31 billion from 13,729 people had come through that portal; the five bank brokers between them handled the rest. By close, more than 18,000 of the 35,403 subscribers were first-time capital-market investors, and they came from all twenty dzongkhags.

Set that against the stock market the country has had for thirty years: twenty-one listed companies, a market capitalisation under USD 800 million, and a trading floor so quiet that one listing per 37,000 citizens is the ratio. One bond issue created more active retail participants in a month than the exchange had accumulated in decades. The onboarding — identity verified, account opened, allocation settled digitally — is now done for eighteen thousand people. The marginal cost of selling them a second instrument is close to zero.

That is what a distribution rail is, and it is the thing India's much larger diaspora window did not build. It is ready for the next issue.

Where the money came from

It is worth being precise about the macroeconomics, because the bond was described at the time as a mobilisation, and it was — but of a particular kind.

The Nu 3.347 billion did not come from abroad and it did not come from new money. It came out of Bhutanese bank deposits. That matters in a banking system that at the time was holding roughly Nu 60 billion above the regulatory minimum, parked at the central bank because the banks could not find enough to lend against. The bond moved about five percent of that idle pool to the issuer. It moved existing money rather than creating new central-bank money, and no sterilisation operation was needed; its direct monetary effect was small.

It also means the bond is not a test of foreign confidence. It is a test of domestic confidence — 35,403 individual subscribers deciding that a ten-year claim on GIDC, which is financing an airport in Gelephu, at ten percent, was a better use of their savings than a fixed deposit. The bond carries a guarantee from GIDC's parent, the Gelephu Mindfulness City Authority, so that confidence rests on GMCA as well as on the project — and it reads high.

What the signal costs

A ten percent tax-free coupon for ten years is expensive money for an issuer with a public parent. It is above what the banks were paying on deposits, which is presumably why the deposits moved. The premium is the price of two things Bhutan chose: no central-bank subsidy, and no institutional buyers to lean on. Both choices are defensible. Neither is free: the annual coupon of some Nu 335 million begins years before the airport opens in 2029.

The bond is a claim on a corporation, not on the state. GIDC's prospectus states that it is secured by a guarantee from GMCA, the city authority, and sets out the counterparty and liquidity risks, as every prospectus must. Subscribers cannot redeem before maturity, and in Bhutan's young market a sale on the exchange may take time to find a buyer. That makes the 35,403 holders something new in Bhutan: a nation of small creditors, in every district, with a direct stake in the airport's success.

The signature that matters

Fifteen months on, the airport site reports earthworks about 65 percent complete and more than 2,000 people at work. The bond is doing what it was sold to do.

But the more durable achievement of May 2025 is not on the site. It is that 18,000 Bhutanese now have a verified digital identity linked to a securities account, an allocation on the exchange, and a coupon arriving every year to remind them the account exists. The country that had a stock market without a market for three decades built, in thirty-three days, the retail base one would need to fix it.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The Number 108: Why It Is Sacred, and Why Project 108 Uses It

bht99 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:37:08 +0000

Beads on a mala. Bell strikes on a Japanese New Year's Eve. Temples a Tibetan king is said to have raised in a single day. Chortens on a Bhutanese mountain pass. The same number keeps appearing across Asia's religious traditions — and in mathematics and the sky as well. Why 108, and why it is the number Bhutan has chosen for 1 November.

On 1 November 2026, Bhutan will raise 108 chortens, each 108 metres from the next, in a project called Project 108. The number is not decoration. It is the most important number in the religious life of the Himalayas, and one of the most widely shared sacred numbers in the world.

In the hand: the mala

Anyone who has watched a Bhutanese grandmother at prayer has seen it. The main string of a Buddhist prayer mala usually carries 108 beads, one for each recitation of a mantra. Shorter malas may have 54, 27 or 21 beads. Hindu japa malas carry the same 108.

Why that count? The most common Buddhist explanation is that it matches the number of defilements — the mental afflictions that bind a being to suffering. One classical way of arriving at it multiplies the six senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind) by three kinds of feeling (pleasant, painful, neutral), by two (arising within or from outside), by three times (past, present, future): 6 × 3 × 2 × 3 = 108. Each bead is a step through them.

In the air: 108 bells

At midnight on 31 December, temples across Japan ring their great bells 108 times. The custom, Joya no Kane, came from Song-dynasty Chinese Zen and took hold in Japan in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Each strike is for one of the 108 worldly desires, rung out with the old year so that the new one begins clean.

On the shelf: the canon

The Kangyur — the Tibetan Buddhist canon of the Buddha's own words, recited and studied in Bhutan's monasteries — usually runs to a hundred or a hundred and eight volumes, depending on the edition. The 108-volume editions are among the most revered.

Beyond Buddhism

The number is older and wider than any one tradition. Hinduism counts 108 Upanishads in its principal canon and gives many deities 108 names. The Jain tradition arrives at 108 by its own arithmetic of the ways karma enters a soul. Traditions that disagree about a great deal agree on this number.

In mathematics and the sky

Part of the number's hold may be that it is unusually tidy.

108 = 1¹ × 2² × 3³. The first three numbers, each raised to its own power, multiply to it.
The inside angle of a regular pentagon is exactly 108 degrees.
The Sun's distance from the Earth is roughly 108 times its own diameter — about 107.5 at the average distance. The Moon's distance is also near 108 of its diameters, though more loosely.

None of this proves anything about the sacred. It does help explain why a number that people kept arriving at by very different routes came to feel like a number the world itself was built around.

In the landscape

Himalayan tradition has built the number into the ground more than once.

Songtsen Gampo's 108 temples. In the seventh century, tradition holds, the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo raised 108 temples across the Himalayas — all, it is said, on the same day — to pin down a demoness lying across the land. Two of them are in Bhutan: Kyichu Lhakhang in Paro and Jambay Lhakhang in Bumthang, among the oldest temples in the country.

The 108 Stupas of Qingtongxia. Beside the Yellow River in north-western China, 108 stupas stand in a triangular array on a hillside, built during the Western Xia period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

Dochula. On the pass between Thimphu and Punakha, 108 chortens were raised in 2004 by Her Majesty the Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, in memory of the soldiers who gave their lives in December 2003. They stand in three tiers of 45, 36 and 27 — and each of those numbers adds up, digit by digit, to nine, as 108 does. Their story is told alongside Gelephu's in Dochula, Gelephu and a Seventh-Century King.

Why Project 108 uses it three times

Project 108 carries the number three times over: 108 Jangchub Chortens, spaced 108 metres apart, raised by volunteers on a single day. Commentators have drawn the line from Songtsen Gampo's legend to Gelephu — 108 sacred structures, raised together, to bless a land. The Jangchub Chorten itself is the form that commemorates the Buddha's enlightenment.

Seen this way, the line along the Mau Chhu is a mala laid on the ground: 108 beads, each a prayer, strung along eleven and a half kilometres of river. How it is planned, and what it is meant to say, is the subject of Project 108: The Plan and the Vision.

Sources

Originally published at bht99.com — a structural diagnosis of modern Bhutan. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.