Religion and History in Bhutan

Bhutan is the last surviving Vajrayana Buddhist state, and its political form was designed by a lama. Ngawang Namgyal, a Drukpa Kagyu hierarch who fled a succession dispute in Tibet in 1616, unified the valleys, repelled repeated Tibetan invasions and established the chhoesi system, a dual order in which a spiritual ruler and a temporal administrator governed together. The dzongs he built, fortress monasteries that still house both the monk body and the district administration of each region, remain the physical expression of that arrangement.

Bhutanese Buddhism traces further back to Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, whose visits in the eighth century are the founding events of the country's sacred geography; the monastery at Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, clings to a cliff above the Paro valley at the site where he is said to have meditated. The state adopted Gross National Happiness as its development framework in preference to output measures, an explicitly Buddhist reordering of what a government is for, and it has been criticised as unfalsifiable and admired as a serious attempt to say so. Monarchy was established in 1907 and voluntarily converted itself into a constitutional democracy in 2008, at the initiative of the king rather than of any movement demanding it.