The name of ‘Swan Maiden story’ is given to tales of three kinds, of which only one is of direct concern in this inquiry.

I. There are stories of bird-maidens who may appear as a single element, sometimes as birds, sometimes as maidens, according to the laws of their being.

II. There is a story woven from several motifs in which a man forces a bird-maiden to become his wife by stealing her feather-robe while she is bathing, thus preventing her from flying off. The pair have children, and one day the bird-woman recovers her feather-robe and flies away with them. As a sequel, the man may pursue her to the other place to which she has returned.

III. The winning of a bird-maiden by stealing her feather-robe may appear as but one element of a long and intricate story.

The Yao dialects constitute a clearly differentiated branch of the Miao-Yao language family, both in vocabulary and phonology. Phonologically, they are characterized by a wide range of vowels and the presence of final consonants, whereas the Miao dialects have generally a very simple system of rhymes but great complexity in the initials. Their close connexion is very apparent, although the rules for sound-correspondences have not yet been worked out. No affiliation of the Miao-Yao languages with any of the neighbouring groups— Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Thai-Sui, or Mon-Khmer—has yet been convincingly demonstrated.

The long struggle of the Thai against the Khmers, culminating in the attacks on and conquest of Angkor early in the fifteenth century A.D., brought the two peoples into intimate association. Thai literature was clearly a beneficiary of this close culture contact, and Cambodian influence upon it, dating back to this early period, is undoubted. Nevertheless, little detailed study of such influence has so far been attempted, partly because of a lack of suitable manuscript material, especially on the Cambodian side, and partly because serious comparative work of an historical nature on the two languages has hardly begun.

In the majority of cases, the religion of contemporary Burma is described as a compound of Theravāda Buddhism and the survivals of an indigenous ‘Animism’. As an anthropological field-worker I have recently found in Burma certain beliefs and rituals which did not appear to fit exactly into either of these two categories. I present here, in two parts, a study of an association which I have chosen to call Messianic Buddhist. In the first part I describe the building in which it is housed and the cults I witnessed, together with beliefs concerning these cults elicited in the course of several conversations with members of the association. In the second part I draw on comparative materials in printed sources in order to justify my choice of terms and to attempt to explain the origin and nature of the association.