Change brings new opportunities, avenues for growth, says Ramon Magsaysay laureate

A Bhutanese scholar and thought leader urged everyone not to be afraid of change but to welcome it as a key to progress.

“Change brings us new opportunities [and] avenues for growth, improvement, and renewal, “ said Karma Phuntsho, one of the 2024 laureates of the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

“I believe that even the basic understanding of culture can reveal that answers to some of the challenges that humanity is facing lies in our past, ancient knowledge, and wisdom traditions,” he shared.

Phuntsho was delivering a lecture about his work on the digital preservation of Bhutan's intangible culture and traditions.

He emphasized how using technology to enrich culture is one of the most practical ways of embracing change.

Phuntsho said that preserving cultural traditions is extremely needed today in his home country, where rapid modernization has been in the past several years.

“[The Bhutanese] have moved in the last 60 years as an oral society to... an audio-visual society without establishing a very strong literary culture,” he shared.

“What we really do is analyze these cultural practices very well to see the timeless core values which we transmit without having to carry the historical baggage that may seem inconvenient,” he also said.

According to Phuntsho, their team has already digitized around five million pages of monastic archives and over three thousand hours of recordings of oral tradition.

He expressed his hopes to publish an encyclopedia about the Bhutanese culture soon.

Through these efforts on cultural dynamism, Phuntsho said he aims to counter the spread of materialism in the world.

“Our focus so much on the external matter [and] property, [as well as] our source of happiness, which is misplaced,” he said.

He also warned against the dangers of individualism, egocentricity, and anthropocentricity, particularly with how they create divisions in society.

Phuntsho is one of the five laureates for 2024 of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious leadership award.

He was honored with the accolade for “his invaluable and enduring contributions towards harmonizing the richness of his country’s past with the diverse predicaments and prospects of its present, inspiring young Bhutanese to be proud of their heritage and confident in their future.”

He is the first Bhutanese to receive the award in more than six decades. 

The other laureates for this year are Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, Vietnamese doctor Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, Indonesian conservationist Farhan Farwiza, and Thailand’s Rural Doctors Movement.