Ariya
Ariya is the awaited deliverer of Karen millenarian religion, a righteous king-messiah whose name descends from the future Buddha Ariya Metteyya and who fuses that Buddhist expectation with the indigenous golden-book myth. Among sects documented in the twentieth century, above all the Telakhon and the Leke of the Pwo and Sgaw hills, Ariya is the one whose coming will reverse the losses of the fall, restoring writing, kingship, wealth and right order to a people who have waited since Y'wa's book slipped from their hands. The figure sits at the meeting point of Buddhist and older Karen strata, and in some tellings the returning white younger brother and the advent of Ariya converge into a single hope. Theodore Stern's study of the Ariya sect remains the classic account of how the millenarian expectation is organised in cult and prophecy.
Domains
- messianism
- kingship
Powers
- is awaited to restore the golden book and righteous order
Sources
- Ariya is the awaited millenarian deliverer of Karen sects such as the Telakhon and Leke, a figure derived from the future Buddha Ariya Metteyya and fused with the golden-book expectation of a restored Karen kingdom and lost writing.: Theodore Stern, 'Ariya and the Golden Book,' Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (1968): 297-328 (secondary); Anders Hovemyr, In Search of the Karen King (Uppsala, 1989) (secondary)