Nation of the forest

Yeshey Dorji

In the mountains above Paro, white prayer flags honor the dead. View full image

Yeshey Dorji

Dechen Dorji ’01MEM View full image

At the king's side

Dechen Dorji has a job that keeps him working long hours, sometimes far into the night. Once, while he was talking on his cell in Dzongkha, the Bhutanese language, I overheard two words in English: “very busy.”

His is an unusual post, considered a great honor—that of professional assistant to Bhutan’s 31-year-old king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. Among his most important duties is to accompany the king on visits to ordinary Bhutanese. They travel with a dozen or more people, on trips that generally take them far off the roads for weeks at a time. “Mostly we’re walking and camping, because we’re in remote villages with no running water and electricity,” says Dechen Dorji. These visits allow the king to help people in need: “When His Majesty encounters people with problems, he offers immediate assistance, wherever feasible.” The Bhutanese call these royal interventions kidu. The king might arrange for a landless farmer to receive land, or for a disabled person without relatives to receive a monthly stipend. But Dechen Dorji is reticent about discussing kidu; he says the king doesn’t like to publicize it. “It’s a sacred and intimate bond between the king and his people. It’s like a family relationship.”

Before taking this job, Dechen Dorji helped found the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute, Bhutan’s first environmental education and research center. It is named for Bhutan’s first king, crowned in 1907. The royal family’s legacy of conservation originated with him; one of his early acts as king was to ask the British for help in blocking illegal logging. His palace, overlooking the Bumthang valley and painted with multicolored flowers and symbols, is now the institute’s home.

The king honored Dechen Dorji in June by presenting him with a distinctive white scarf—symbolic of the core values of Buddhism—and a sword he must wear every day at work. It’s three feet long, with a scabbard decorated in silver and gold. And it’s heavy. “The weight of the sword is supposed to remind us, on a daily basis, of the weight of our responsibilities as a ‘decorated’ citizen,” says Dechen Dorji. Like the traditional Bhutanese dress required at the office, the sword is a reminder of the obligation to preserve Bhutanese culture and, by implication, of the mandate to foster gross national happiness.

“All over the world, when you say ‘Bhutan,’ we are recognized for our good values,” Dechen Dorji says. “Big, developed European countries applaud our development philosophy of GNH, because it resonates. Whether you’re American or Indian or Malaysian, these are universal human values.”  

Prayer flags for the dead never posed a problem in Bhutan until people began moving to cities.

In the Tibetan Buddhism practiced here, mourners honor the dead by flying 108 white flags, each attached to a tall wooden pole. They plant the poles on high ridges where, they believe, the wind will broadcast the prayers and mantras printed on the flags, enhancing the well-being of all living creatures. But now that a third of Bhutanese are concentrated in cities, deaths are concentrated there too. The need to cut thousands of trees for flagpoles year after year threatens to denude the surrounding hillsides.

In the early 1960s, when Sangay Wangchuk ’93MF was a small boy, few Bhutanese could afford enough cloth for 108 flags. His parents were subsistence farmers with little cash, and the climate was too cool for growing cotton. Once a year, they walked to India to buy essentials like cloth and salt. The trip took seven days, and whatever they brought back, they had to carry.

Nowadays, people have enough cash to buy flags and easy access to them, says Sangay Wangchuk, who directs the Forestry Centre for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. (Like most Bhutanese, he uses a two-part first name and no family name.) “Suddenly,” he says, “everything is available.”

Western-style consumption has come only recently to Bhutan, where tourists were not admitted until 1974 and television and the Internet were prohibited until 1999. Today, the government is actively trying to reduce poverty by promoting economic development. In Thimphu, the capital (and, with a population of more than 80,000, the largest city by far), the stores lining the commercial streets stacked on the hillside sell DVDs, computers, construction materials, imitation North Face jackets, and, for tourists, silver bracelets and scrolls painted with deities. Specialty shops catering to monks sell robes, sunhats, and fleece jackets, all in the maroon-and-gold palette of Tibetan Buddhism. They also sell prayer flags.

To spare the trees, since 2006 forest department rules have limited mourners to 29 poles and designated which trees can be cut. The traditional number of 108 is sacred, but Sangay Wangchuk says city dwellers have actually welcomed the restriction. “It’s like any other city—there are so many things to attend to. Now when they’re told, ‘We can give you only 29,’ they say, ‘Fine.’”

Dwindling pine groves are the kind of problem posed by economic growth in any developing, or developed, country. But two things make Bhutan singular: first, its royal family has promoted an ethic of conservation, what the Bhutanese call “the vision of our kings.” Second, the Bhutanese have formulated guidelines, infused with Buddhist values, for how to reconcile old and new, prayer flags and cities, so as to raise their standard of living while conserving their culture and environment. A small group of Yale alumni—Sangay Wangchuk and a dozen others who have studied forestry or environmental management at Yale since the early 1990s—are among the elite whose efforts will help to determine whether Bhutan can pull this off.