Kariyan (also Karian) is a village and gram panchayat in the Shivaji Nagar block of Samastipur district, Bihar. By local tradition it is the birthplace of Udayanacharya (Udayana), the great Maithil Brahmin logician of the Nyaya school, author of the Nyayakusumanjali and Atmatattvaviveka — works credited, alongside those of Kumarila Bhatta, with the philosophical decline of Buddhism in eastern India.
The modern village sits on a mound roughly twenty feet high covering about 96 acres; excavations there have yielded antiquities ranging from the 2nd century BCE to the post-1200 CE period, marking it as a very old centre of habitation. The site lies about 16 km north-east of Rosera Ghat railway station and some 28 km from the Samastipur district headquarters.
The village also remembers the Vaishnava saint Sanaknandanacharya and the modern Maithili poet Kali Kant Jha ‘Buch.’ The everyday language is Maithili, and Kariyan stands as one of Mithila’s storied scholar-villages in the tract south of the Budhi Gandak.
