The Lahu mountain folk, numbering some 700,000, are traditionally swidden farmers, who share with other peoples the rugged highlands along the borderlands between China’s Yunnan Province and the Southeast Asian nations of Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
Lahu ideas and practices related to the supernatural world include a traditional animism affirming innumerable spirit entities, with varying capacities to protect and to harm mortal beings, and investing culturally significant phenomena with animating soul force. The majority of Lahu recognize an almighty creator-divinity, who is for many the principal focus of worship. The author argues that Mahayana Buddhist monks in Yunnan likely generated this situation during the 18th and 19th centuries, by linking the Lahu’s earlier concept of a non-intervening creator-divinity with their own notions of transcendental Buddhahood. Subsequently, monotheistic Christianity was able to utlize and strengthen an already well-established Lahu theistic tradition.
For 200 years or more, the everyday ritual lives and supportive ideologies of many Lahu communities have been challenged periodically by messianic priests, usually seeking to unite their politically fragmented mountain folk into a wider polity capable of challenging the might of valley-dwelling overlords. A series of theocratic Buddhist monks were significant perpetrators, if not the founders, of Lahu messianism. Important Christian missionaries likewise were seen as messiahs by large numbers of their Lahu followers.

This book, the result of more than 35 years of research in field and library, seeks to explain the diverse ideological strands and associated liturgical practices that inform the worldviews of the Lahu-speaking peoples.
The work is presented in three parts. One: a micro-study of the Lahu community in North Thailand in which the author lived for four years, together with an investigation of that community’s social-historical matrix; Two: an examination of the diverse strands of Lahu supernatural ideas and ritual practices, from routine animo-theism to Mahayana Buddhism and the religio-political crises generated by messianic priests; and Three: a portrayal of the Lahu’s experience with Christianity, a worldview that has attracted about a quarter of the entire ethnic category, in the author’s view because its propagators have been able to manipulate to their advantage the Lahu’s prior messianic traditions.