Project 108 Relics: The Zung Inside Every Chorten

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.