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

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.