A shaft of morning light slants across the ancient temple floor, illuminating an elderly woman kneeling before a pillar of stone and 108 kernels of corn. The pillar is the most sacred relic in Nabji, a village tucked deep into the Black Mountains of central Bhutan, beyond the reach of roads and electricity. Legend holds that a small depression in the stone is the hand­print of the Guru Rimpoche, the eighth-century mystic who arrived in Bhutan on the back of a flying tigress to spread a Tibetan form of Tantric Buddhism. And the kernels of corn? They are the calculus of devotion. Each time the gray-haired woman named Tum Tum prostrates herself, she slides one of the 108 kernels (a sacred number) across the floor. In three months she has moved the kernels 95,000 times—1,000 prostrations a day—and will continue until she reaches 100,000. “Sometimes I get so tired I fall over,” says Tum Tum, whose knees have left grooves in the floorboards. “But I won’t stop. This is our tradition.”

Few places on the planet can be more rooted in tradition than rural Bhutan. Nearly 70 percent of the population lives in villages like Nabji, cradled by virgin forest and vertiginous mountains, six hours on foot from the nearest road. Nabji’s terraced fields are empty today. It is a holy day on the lunar calendar, and the rough-hewn villagers circumambulate the temple in their finest robes—bright floor-length kiras for women, patterned knee-length ghos for men. The only signs of modernity are two solar panels installed on the temple roof to power a wireless telephone—and they don’t work. Nabji’s farmers put their faith in another kind of wireless communication: the prayer flags fluttering in the cypress trees above. “Every time the wind blows,” says Rike, a former village headman, “it takes our prayers straight to the heavens. No machines required.”

A sense of humor, even mischief, runs through Bhutanese Buddhism, whose earthy exuberance differs sharply from the ethereal calm of the better known Theravada Buddhism. The profusion of deities and demons can leave other Buddhists dazed. Sexual imagery also abounds, reflecting the tantric belief that carnal relations can be the gateway to enlightenment. Nobody embodied this idea more provocatively than the 16th-century lama Drukpa Kunley, better known as the Divine Madman, who remains a beloved saint in much of Bhutan. Carousing across the countryside, Kunley slew demons and granted enlightenment to young maidens with the magical powers of his “flaming thunderbolt.” To this day, many Bhutanese houses are adorned with his sign of protection: an enormous painted phallus, often wrapped in a jaunty bow.