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

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.