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

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.