Researcher and writer Jules Pretty‘s climb to Bhutan’s Taktstang mountain temple reveals a nation’s story of hope and regeneration through its common focus on Gross National Happiness. “Difficult to reach, but not impossible. Like solving a world crisis…”
2,050 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes
It is said, each person of Bhutan wishes to make a pilgrimage to Taktstang. Founded in 1692, centuries of reverent feet. A great magnitude of devotion, the build and the maintenance, here on thunder mountain.
Hello old friend, you say. I know you.
For this is who is waiting.
Taktstang temple calls quietly to the soul. Just welcoming, not demanding. Shall we take up where we left off? Up here hidden in mountains.
At this bird-perched temple and monastery built into the kilometre-high cliff. Half in cloud, spires golden, serenaded by forest birds in the thin air after rain. Hidden, not hidden, hidden again.
Difficult to reach, but not impossible.
Like solving a world crisis, say stopping the use of obsolete fossil fuels, preventing the scouring up of nature.
The climb to the Tiger’s Nest begins not long after dawn. Up there in the eastern hills above Paro, under the blue dome of sky. Up the trail, up steps and foot-worn paths. Through cool groves of seven-needled pine and oak, orchid and fern and old-man’s beard, rich epiphytes on every branch.
The climb’s stiff, at altitude. The sun leaps from the sheer granite cliff, lights the forest, swings around to shine on temple roofs and white walls of stone and clay. Beneath is the drop, the ascent. There’s a fluting bird, the yellow-billed magpie. There are bright prayer flags holding the land together.
Gross National Happiness — changing a country’s story
A pilgrimage of this kind is said to need right speech, body and mind. Speech is the story, body’s the hard work, mind’s the agency and effort. It’s a lesson for any kind of transformation.
The mind gradually empties as you climb. There’s the physical and mental test, then comes a muffled roar, a detachment from sky and land. The wind horses have stopped running. It’s the alchemy of change.
A single white cloud is fixed upon the azure sky.
The temple shimmers, across the ravine.
Far below is the valley, the contoured rice around the town.
Guides accompany each group of visitors. Jigme Chodup says, “One hundred and eighty-one.” The number of times he’s walked this upward pilgrimage. Here came Guru Rinpoche with his consort, she the flying tiger. Here they crushed the dark spirit, the mara of the mountain.
At some point it’s time to turn. To walk down the old trail that’s now a new trail, past herbs and orchids in the forest, past scars of landslips. Passing climbing pilgrims.
“Is there far to go?” A question about life itself.
“No, not far! Don’t stop. Transformation awaits.”
Such hope means taking risks. Precisely what the Fourth King does in the early 1970s. He takes a risk, and people give support.
At the age of 18, people say King Jigme Wingchuk seems mature for his years. He declares Bhutan’s primary aim should be Gross National Happiness. All else should serve this: economy, culture, society.
Some in other countries smirk at the idea of Gross National Happiness. Come on, what about growth? You can’t eat happiness.
What’s Bhutan now known for? Well, precisely this one big and beautiful story.
Gross National Happiness is described in Bhutanese as Gakid Palzon. Ga-happy, Kid-peaceful, Pel-prosperity, Zon-convergent. GNH means “happy-peaceful-prosperity-convergence for all.”
It’s completely changed the story of the country. The way that people talk, their identity, how they act.
A country with no litter, no plastic pollution, no person smoking in public. No pesticides or herbicides, so an abundant insect presence. Every tree filled by a noise-wall of crickets, every green space rich with flocks of butterfly. Nine hundred species of butterflies in the country, thousands more of moths. A country with no slaughterhouse, not one fast-food outlet. All the food organic, all agriculture regenerative.
And this too: phone coverage everywhere, no dead signal zones. All electricity from hydropower, the surplus sold to India and now the primary source of national income. The next step: electrify transport.
Who’s the trickster now?
The king gives up his position, wants the next generation to bring new ideas. The Fifth King says, we’ll give away my power, create a voting democracy. As easy as that.
The country with a negative carbon footprint, it’s now one of a small group with the lowest internal social inequality in the world. And this: the 5th King’s vision for a new settlement in the south, Gelephu Mindfulness City. High tech, new jobs, integrated with wildlife, all the buildings made of wood.
What is it then? Are people elsewhere afraid of the idea of this sort of contentment? That they’ll have to give up things to find it?
What you’ve also not got. You’ll hear no one saying, we think selfishness is best, or friendliness is the enemy of economic growth. Or that growth is king.
The guide Jigme stops, says, “Just think of what we’d lose.”
That wider world of wonder. It’s still in a hole.
This small country never fell in. This hidden land, it’s not in the hole and it knows how to stay out.
The trickster’s wearing a mask. It’s rags to riches. Right enough, happiness riches.
People love that story. They never get enough of it.
The audience laughs. Too true.
The Masked Dance
One mountain day starts like this. Sunshine, hot for autumn. Clouds hide the hill-tops and snow-slopes of the great Himalayan peaks. It’s the first of three days of masked dance and celebration. The Tsechu festival, the best time of the year.
The first day of dance. The dzong amphitheatre’s brim-full, eight thousand people, dancers down on the stone performance square. To one side, the citadel, white-walls and golden roofs. Clowns in masks wander, prodding the serious dancers, leaning into their faces, engaging with the audience in a side-show of jest and laughter.
The tricksters mimic moves, exaggerate, play at slap-stick entertainment.
No one’s allowed to take themselves too seriously. Laughter is good.
The audience loves it.
The national TV station broadcasts all the action across the three days. Homes and restaurants have their TVs running all day. There’s no commentary. Everyone knows the stories.
Here’s the Black Hat dance, monks spinning as they fight the devils of desire, beating hand-held drums.
Here are masked animals. The mythical faces of gold and green and blue: the tiger, the snow-lion, garuda, dragon. The audience eats and chats and points.
Here’s the dance of couples, a tall woman and man, calm-faced masks, tested to the limit. Yet the marriage survives it all. Children laugh, play on phones.
Rain starts to fall, gently as moths at evening dusk. Five thousand umbrellas ping open, and families cluster underneath.
Nature’s an important healer too. Especially when it’s abundant. When it’s not being beaten half to death on the ropes.
Overlooking the capital, all perched on steep slopes, the river dashing far below, high on the hill is the fifty-metre golden Buddha. Often hidden in clouds. But present, all the same, in people’s lives.
Sunlight briefly falls upon the Buddha. On his shoulders, on his lap, on his smiling face. The mountain dances, the arching rainbow a scarf wound around the mountain’s wrist.
And in each temple, in each Dzong fort, there’s golden light on the Buddha and disciples, on Guru Rinpoche who brought Buddhism to the country. Energy flows in from the universe, streams out again. Butter lamps flutter in the endless draughts, wind channelled down wooden corridors, high windows open to the world.
In the golden light of the sweet butter lamps, shadows dance on walls, murals are alive with tiger and snow-lion and elephant. The animals jump and blink, as it did for early humans when they stood right before the cliff face, the cave wall.
A monk pours saffron water on your hands.
For this is a place of story. How to care for places, keep them sacred.
By the banks of the river, two villages are engaged in archery competition. The men are mostly elders, burned by life in the fields. Like all team sports, there’s laughter, jesting, ribbing. They’re wearing sashes on their belts, one for each successful strike.
The target’s no more than a handspan wide. It’s 140 metres away.
Hitter and hit are not two opposing objects, they are the reality of the whole. The archer, the bamboo bow, the bamboo arrow. The arrow departs the eye of the archer, curves high in the sky. Time passes as it arches over the butts. There’s an acceleration at the end as the arrow at last is caught by the eye.
There’s an unzipping of the air, the arrow buries two feet deep, into the grassy mound, into the target.
The men simply sway aside. They call to the next archer, right a bit, up-up. Listen to the wind, to all the world around them. Another arrow pierces the sky.
A team breaks into dance and song when the arrow strikes the tiny target.
Jigme laughs, says, “Well, they are a bit drunk.”
All around, the contoured gold and green of paddy fields. Some drained and cut, hand threshing underway. The irrigation water travels from one field to the next below. Frogs are calling.
And so the monsoon rebounds, dashes in. A month after it should be over.
A growth story of the 21st century
Sixteen hours of torrential rain. Crashing thunder dragon, fire and lightning. Morning light comes late, dull and blue. The hills are hidden in mist. The river’s maddened, no longer blue and sweet, now a rushing, crashing venomous snake. Water strikes rocks, rises high in standing waves, whole trees spinning and leaping away.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. At this time of year,” says Jigme.
Never has such a storm come, so long after the old certainties of the monsoon.
On the drive over the Dorchu-la Pass, there are landslides every forty or fifty metres. Rocks ping off the road ahead, bounce away. The driver looks up, the guide looks ahead.
And what ugly devils stirred up this storm? Brought it to the people whose carbon footprint is less than zero?
All over the country, all across the north-east of the sub-continent, landslides and falling rock, bridges washed away. Snowstorms fall on the high mountains, strand climbers, a hydro dam is overtopping.
What else will come to the Himalaya with its forty thousand mountain glaciers? A billion people relying on a calm supply of meltwater for drink and irrigation.
Bhutan’s the growth story of the twenty-first century. Growth of happiness, growth of economy working within strict boundaries, growth of equality. An economy that does not impose externalities on others. A marvellous thing.
People here, they’re earth-cherishing people, as Joan Halifax has put it. They know how to look after the future.
How to be happy, peaceful, convergent.
Your age of oil? It’ll soon be over.
Eight hundred summers ago, Dōgen Zenji slides open rice-paper doors in Japan. He’s in the temple he founded, Eihei-Ji, the temple of eternal peace.
He sees, mountain, cloud, patches of blue sky. He writes this in the Mountains and Waters Sutra:
“There are mountains hidden in sky.
There are mountains hidden in mountains.
There are mountains hidden in hiddenness.”
Find more
UPDATE February 2026: You can now watch National Happiness and Social Equality: This is How Bhutan Did It, a special companion video to this post, recorded by Jules as part of his Story for Climate & Nature Recovery YouTube Channel.
Jules’s guide, Jigme Chodup, works for the Thimphu company, Keys to Bhutan.
“Anything that exists is possible,” is the message of this short YouTube excerpt of a feature on Bhutan’s journey with Gross National Happiness (with a link to the full documentary).
You can find out more about Gross National Happiness and other measures for wellbeing at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
For more on the role of story, see Jules Pretty’s YouTube channel, Story for Climate and Nature Recovery — including this short video on the role of Tricksters in Story. We have featured Story for Climate and Nature Recovery in our Creative Showcase.
For more of his research and writing at Jules’s website.
Jules Pretty
Artist-writer 
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