So few people come to Bhutan, but it’s a place the world needs to know about—maybe now more than ever. It’s not a perfect place. But it’s quite a place of refuge.
I first came here in the early 1990s, at the urging of some Bhutanese friends I’d met at the United Nations in New York City. Like most people who visit, I ended up completely smitten. Bhutan is like no other place.
I kept coming back, in 1994, 1995, 1996, like a moth to a very rarified, very remote flame. Then, in 1997, the government allowed me to come and teach English at a cultural school outside Thimphu. I wasn’t a trained teacher and I can’t say I was a great one. I joke that the government lets me stay now as long as I promise not to teach anymore.
I’ve been here ever since—now going on 30 years. Along the way I married a Bhutanese thangka painter named Namgay, wrote a lot about this tiny Buddhist kingdom, and somehow I made a life here that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
I felt compelled to be here from the moment I first arrived. It’s not easy to get to or to relocate to. But from the time I came off the plane and smelled the clean mountain air and saw the smiling, serene faces of the Bhutanese, I felt something settle in me. I felt, for the first time in a long time, that I was somewhere that made sense.
Part of what makes Bhutan so extraordinarily serene is its isolation. Not many countries are so remote or so ethereal. Surrounded by mountains, even today very little can come in or go out. The planes that fly in have to be small enough to land and take off quickly in narrow mountain valleys. You really have to want to be here. And that is part of the point. Not everything worth having should be easy to reach.
And when I feel wobbly about the madness in the outside world, I think about the tigers.
The Royal Bengal tiger was not always a Himalayan creature. Historically at home in the hot, dense, sea-level plains of India, the tiger has over many decades migrated away from urban development and habitat incursions by humans, moving steadily upward, out of the lowlands and into the mountains, adapting to the thin air of higher altitudes, until underpopulated Bhutan became one of its last great strongholds. Bhutan has recorded tigers at 4,400 meters above sea level, the highest altitude documented anywhere in the world. It is the only place on Earth where snow leopards and tigers share the same habitats. Even the tigers have figured out that this is the place to be when the world below becomes too fraught.
And the world below has become very fraught. Globally, wild tigers have lost more than 90 per cent of their historic range. The pressures that drove them from the plains—habitat destruction, human encroachment, poaching, the general human talent for making places uninhabitable—have not relented. But here in Bhutan, tigers are not just surviving; they are thriving. Bhutan has increased its tiger population by 27 per cent since 2015, with around 131 individuals now counted. There are probably more. And the tiger population of Royal Manas Park on the border with India has doubled in six years.
Tigers are an apex species with no predators. They need large swaths of land to hunt and breed, and Bhutan gives them that. In a world losing wild things at a staggering rate, this is nothing short of a miracle. And it is not an accident: it is the direct result of a country that made a conscious decision to be a sanctuary, not just for its own people, but for the living world.
In the Buddhist teaching, refuge is one of the most profound concepts, and one that speaks to me deeply. To take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha is the foundational act of Buddhist practice. Turning toward something trustworthy, something that will not betray you, something that holds, is fundamental. Bhutan has become a refuge in exactly this sense; not as an escape from reality, but as a place where reality is met more honestly, more gently, and with more humor than most places manage.
Within this small country, just 172 kilometers north to south and 332 kilometers east to west, you find every conceivable climate zone, from glaciers in the north to temperate forests in the middle to rainforest in the south. It was also never colonized, which has helped keep its culture and its profound Buddhist heritage remarkably intact. Monasteries and dzongs perch on cliffsides as if gravity is just a suggestion. Prayer flags are strung across mountain passes, sending their blessings out on the wind to all sentient beings. In Bhutan you feel that, rather than just reading about it. The idea that all living things are connected, that the well-being of one is bound up in the well-being of all, is a lived reality. This is why Bhutan has more land under environmental protection than almost any other country on earth. This is why the tigers came.
GNH, Gross National Happiness, the philosophy that has guided Bhutan’s development since the 1970s, is measured against four pillars: good governance, equitable economic development, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation. These are deeply consistent with Buddhist values; with the idea that a good society is one that reduces suffering and cultivates the conditions for human flourishing. The Bhutanese are deeply aware of what they have, and they have chosen, deliberately and repeatedly, to protect it.
The reverence for nature here flows directly from the Buddhist teachings about interdependence, about the web of relationships connecting all beings. A system of national park corridors covers a vast portion of the country, allowing animals to migrate freely. The dream is to eventually connect these corridors all the way through Nepal, India, Myanmar, and Thailand—a wildlife highway through the Himalayas for all creatures seeking higher ground. Bhutan is a sanctuary not just for its own wildlife, but as the beating heart of a much larger refuge, pumping tigers and snow leopards and hope outward into a world that badly needs all three.
The world is loud and frightened and burning through its fuel. Up here the tigers are thriving. It makes me happy and peaceful to think we share this place with them.
Living in Bhutan has taught me that refuge is not only a place; it is a practice. It is something you turn toward, again and again, in the middle of ordinary life. It might be a mountain kingdom at the top of the world. It might be a few minutes of stillness in the morning before the noise begins. It might be the stubborn decision to tend something beautiful (a flower, a child, a movement) in a world that seems determined to tear everything down.
You do not have to come to Bhutan to find refuge. But it helps to know that somewhere up here, above the cloud line, the tigers are calm and the prayer flags are flying and the monks are chanting. And I continue to not teach the children. That the world contains such a place is, in itself, a kind of refuge.
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