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

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.