Buki — Phom creator-god

Buki of the Phom

The creator of a people who are now largely Christian

Buki is the supreme creator in the tradition of the Phom people of Longleng district, Nagaland — one of the smaller Naga groups, in a state where the great majority of the population is now Christian. That fact has to be placed first, because it governs how the entry should be read. This is not a neglected living cult in the ordinary sense. It is a cosmology, largely carried as heritage, memory and identity by a community that has formally adopted another religion. The two coexist, and the terms on which they coexist are local and not fully described.

What can be said is the shape. Buki stands at the head of a creator tradition of a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people, and — as with the other Naga groups — the cosmology is oral. The Phom language has no long-established written literary tradition, so the corpus cannot quote a scripture for this entry even in principle; what exists is recited material, and the Monyü and Moha observances. The previous revision named an April harvest festival and a seed-festival with the dates attached; those are the kinds of detail that need a Phom-specific source, and the editor did not have one, so they are given here without the confident dating the old file carried.

Two things a reader should be careful about. First, this is not a variant of the Hindu or the Buddhist cosmogony, and should not be described as one. It belongs with the indigenous religious systems of the Naga hill tribes, which have their own structure and their own logic, and which comparison with the Sanskrit traditions usually distorts. Second, the population figure in the frontmatter is dated, and a demographic claim about a small community should be checked against a census rather than carried forward. The "Longleng District Gazetteer" is a real and useful document, but the district administration and the missionary and colonial records of the hill tracts each describe the same communities through quite different lenses, and a guardian should read them with that in mind.

What this entry most needs is a Phom speaker. The corpus is currently recording a creator's name, a festival calendar taken from a template, and a placeholder for a source. That is a thin record for a people, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to fill it with the generalities of "tribal religion".

Sources and what is still unverified

Longleng District Gazetteer, Nagaland, and the census returns, are the concrete starting points. What the file needs added is a named study of the Phom — ideally one written with, or by, members of the community — and a guardian with a Phom contact should be named in the file. The previous revision cited The Tribal Religions of India under a co-author who did not write it; the correct attribution to L. P. Vidyarthi and S. C. Sinha is now given in the frontmatter. Still unverified: the content of the Buki tradition, the festival names and dates, the present ritual life, the population, and the relation of the oral cosmology to the Christian practice of the same people. Left , and flagged as a file that should not be published without a community reader.