Yojay Today: How Bhutan Is Renewing the Offering for a Global Age

On any day of the year, somewhere in Bhutan, monks are performing a ritual that someone once asked for. The Zhung Dratshang’s monasteries — 327 of them, in all twenty dzongkhags — perform some 9,037 days of ritual a year, as The Bhutanese reported in 2023. For centuries much of that calendar was paid for by fields: land given so that prayers would be said, harvested so that the monks who said them would eat. That story is told in Yojay in Bhutan: Four Hundred Years of Offering.

The fields are no longer being given. The rituals still are performed. What Bhutan has been building since 2023 is the bridge between the two.

2023: a day, and a structure

Three things happened in 2023, within a few months of one another.

The day. On His Majesty The King’s instruction, the Central Monastic Body revived the practice of offering and gave it a day. In September 2023, in honour of the birth of Her Royal Highness the Gyalsem, it declared Dratshang Yojay Gi Nyim — the Day of Offering to the Zhung Dratshang. The government made the inaugural offering. When Parliament opened its winter session that October, the Speaker welcomed the revival as a way for young Bhutanese to understand and carry forward the country’s culture. Institutions followed: on 11 November 2023, the birth anniversary of His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo, the Royal Civil Service Commission and the civil servants’ committee offered Nu 1 million.

The care. On 15 September 2023, at Tashichhodzong, His Holiness the Je Khenpo launched a pension scheme for monks and nuns, with a seed fund of Nu 10 million. It pays Nu 7,360 a month to monastics aged 65 or over with at least ten years’ service; 323 of the more than 7,000 registered monks and nuns qualified at the start, and UNICEF helped design the scheme and its financing. It turns the logic of yojay towards the monastics themselves: a fund that looks after those who have spent their lives saying the prayers.

The structure. On 30 April 2023, by Royal Charter, Gerab Nyed-Yon Limited was established to hold and manage the Zhung Dratshang’s assets — the land, buildings and investments accumulated over four centuries of offerings. It became operational that October, was registered as a company in December, and in March 2024 received its first transfers of land in Thimphu, Paro, Punakha, Wangdue and Chhukha. Kuensel reported in August 2025 that it had exceeded its targets for 2024.

The system as it now works

Kuensel’s account of August 2026, contributed by Dasho Kinley Dorji, sets out how the revived yojay is governed — as a partnership.

The monastic body decides what offerings are for and performs the rituals. A professionally run company manages, invests and accounts for what is given. The division is the modern form of something the old Land Act already insisted on: an offering belongs to the institution, not to any individual, and the ritual it was given for must be performed.

From anywhere in the world

The largest change is reach. A field could only be given by someone who owned a field in Bhutan. The revived yojay, as Kuensel describes it, runs on a secure, multilingual digital channel through which devotees anywhere in the world can:

• support specific rituals,
• request prayers and spiritual services,
• receive an official acknowledgement of their offering, and
• keep a record of what they have given.

A Bhutanese family in Perth can request prayers in Bhutan without flying home. A devotee in Singapore who has never visited can support a ritual in Bhutan. What once required being present now requires only intention.

Kuensel is careful to say what this is not. Yojay is not to be associated with commercial fundraising campaigns. It remains voluntary; its value is held to lie in the intention, not the amount; and it is made, as it always was, for merit and blessing. What that asks of the institutions receiving it is the subject of its own essay.

Why now

The reasons given are frank. A modern economy creates a need for professional governance, financial accountability and continuity of monastic welfare. Urbanisation and dwindling land endowments call for predictable support. And the young — less bound than their grandparents to unquestioning faith — ask for a clearer account of what an offering means and where it goes. A system that records every offering, acknowledges it and accounts for it answers that question directly.

Bhutan as a centre

There is a larger idea running through all of this. Kuensel’s account speaks of the Zhung Dratshang’s custodianship of Bhutan’s Vajrayana lineage as a spiritual depth that reaches devotees everywhere — and of a royal vision to make yojay a trusted institutional platform.

It is not a new role. In 1772, when Bhutan’s Desi relinquished Vijaypur at the request of Prithvi Narayan Shah of Nepal, Bhutan was given, as compensation, custodial rights over Swayambhunath in Kathmandu and its monastic lands — one of the most sacred stupas of the Himalaya placed in Bhutanese keeping.

The evidence that the Buddhist world still looks to Bhutan is recent and public.

• November 2025. His Holiness the Je Khenpo conferred full ordination on 265 nuns from fourteen countries — 128 of them from outside Bhutan — during the Global Peace Prayer Festival in Thimphu, which brought together leaders of the Mahayana, Theravāda and Vajrayana traditions. On 20 November, as the new gelongmas walked down Norzin Lam with their bowls, Their Majesties The King and the Gyaltsuen offered the first alms, and hundreds of people lined the street to offer after them.
• 2026. When the Central Monastic Body invited offerings for the sacred relics of Project 108’s chortens, they came from Bhutan and abroad; among the sponsors of the chortens themselves were Bhutanese living overseas and supporters in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

Bhutan is small. What it holds is not: a monastic institution in continuous existence since 1620, in a sovereign country whose Constitution names Buddhism as its spiritual heritage and keeps its religious institutions above politics. For a devotee anywhere who wants an offering to reach a living Vajrayana tradition, and to be sure it is honoured, there are few places in the world that can offer both.

Going forward

The revived yojay is young. Its test will be the one every tradition of giving has faced: whether, year after year, offerings are used as the givers intended. The structure has been built for that — a monastic body that performs the rituals, a company that accounts for the money, a record for every giver.

What it offers the giver has not changed since the Zhabdrung’s day. It is the opportunity to take part, by one’s own choice, in keeping a four-hundred-year-old institution alive. For the Bhutanese who now live far from home, that opportunity has a particular meaning — the subject of Yojay From Abroad. Why the practice matters even more in a world of scattered families and changing lives is the subject of Yojay in a Changing World.