Puff the magic dragon! Even the country’s official name is magically evocative: The Kingdom of the Peaceful Thunder Dragon. Barely a half-million “people from the highland,” which Bhutan means in Sanskrit, have created a distinct culture in the isolation of their abode which is the narrow valleys of the Inner Himalaya Mountains. In that Shangri-la over centuries they mixed Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism with esoteric Tantrism and local Bon myths and legends of demons and animistic deities. Their only standing monuments of the past are the fortresses of their feudal elite. The monarchy that has prevailed in the last century is drawing upon this tradition to preserve its vision of the future. While much of that vision is from the fertile imagination of one man, the Fourth King, it is buttressed by emphasis on compassion and community. The audacious conceit is that happiness should be the goal of development in an age whose goals are defined in material terms. Foreign access to this experimental laboratory is carefully guarded, at the same time that Bhutan is becoming all the more attractive due to the increasing limitations on touring other Himalayan countries >>> more
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