Karen

The Karen religion is kept most strongly by the highland Sgaw among the Karen peoples of southern and eastern Burma. It is built on the idea that every person is embodied by thirty-seven spirits. Illness and misfortune come when one of them wanders away, and death comes when all thirty-seven have left the body.

Buddhism reached the Karen through the Mon, who dominated Lower Burma until the middle of the eighteenth century, and was brought to the Pwo-speaking Karen in the late 1700s. Many Sgaw stayed heterodox, joining Buddhist merit-making to strong animist belief, and a kind of pagoda worship called duwae kept animist roots inside Buddhist practice.