The Country That Pays Its Monks

The full numbers

The “Monastic Education” category in the NSB Labour Force Survey 2022 covers 7,408 employed Bhutanese — primarily ordained monks and nuns in formal monastic institutions, including the Dratshang and affiliated bodies. The banking sector — across BoB, BNB, BDB, T-Bank, Druk PNB, and the digital bank — employs approximately 3,000-3,500 Bhutanese. The monastic body is 2-2.5x the banking sector by headcount. (Both are dwarfed by the Education sector at 12,566 and Health at 6,069.)

Imagine this

A village in Trashigang has, by Bhutanese standards, a typical institutional ecosystem: one primary school (about 10 teachers), one health sub-centre (2 health workers), one police outpost (4 officers), one Goenpa (monastery, with 30-40 resident monks), and one BoB ATM (no resident staff). The village’s largest single employer of resident workforce is the monastery. The monks outnumber the teachers, health workers, and police combined. This pattern repeats across Bhutan. Religious institutions are a real labour-market category — not symbolic, not part-time, not informal. They are employers in the proper sense.

Where this came from

Bhutan’s institutional history is built around the Drukpa Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. The monastic body — the Dratshang Lhentshog — is a constitutional institution with formal recognition. Successive Royal Governments have supported and expanded the monastic body as a deliberate cultural preservation policy. The result is one of the world’s largest per-capita monastic populations.

Why this matters now

The size of the monastic body is a political-cultural decision, not an economic accident. The question worth surfacing is whether the current proportion was deliberately chosen — through deliberate policy, royal direction, parliamentary appropriation — or whether it simply continued growing because nobody questioned it. Both can be valid; the difference is whether the country owns the choice.

What it should be

There is no objectively right answer. Bhutan’s civilisational identity is tied to its monastic body. The question is not “should this be smaller” but “is the current size the result of deliberate choice or inherited momentum?”

How others do it

• Thailand — monks vastly outnumber bankers. Thailand has ~300,000 monks in a country of 70M (1 monk per 230 people). Bhutan’s ratio is roughly comparable (1 monk per 100 people if we add unregistered monastic workers to the 7,408 formally counted).
• Myanmar — monks vastly outnumber bankers; an estimated 500,000+ monks.
• Sri Lanka — about 40,000 monks in 22M population. Similar to Bhutan proportionally.
• USA, UK, France — bankers outnumber clergy by orders of magnitude. The two sectors are not even comparable.
• Bhutan’s pattern is regional norm for Buddhist-majority states. But for outsiders, the proportion is striking — and worth a conversation about whether it’s intentional or inherited.

The question we should be sitting with

Should a country’s monastic infrastructure be bigger than its banking infrastructure? If yes, that is a deliberate civilisational choice — but is it actually deliberate, or is it just legacy? When was the last time the country formally debated the size of the monastic body?