Maitreya- Buddhist GodDeity"The Future Buddha"

Waiting in Tushita Heaven

Maitreya, from the Sanskrit maitri ("loving-kindness"), is the future Buddha prophesied to appear when Gautama Buddha's teachings have been forgotten entirely. Every major Buddhist tradition accepts his coming: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana alike. He dwells now in Tushita Heaven, the same celestial realm where Gautama lived before his final birth, teaching the dharma to gods and bodhisattvas while he waits.

The Indian master Asanga meditated twelve years in a cave, desperate for a vision of Maitreya. When he finally abandoned his retreat, he found a dying dog by the roadside, its body crawling with maggots. Asanga bent to help, so filled with compassion that he tried to remove the maggots with his tongue to avoid crushing them. The dog transformed into Maitreya. The bodhisattva had been present all along, invisible until compassion burned through the obscurations of Asanga's mind. Transported to Tushita, Asanga received five treatises that became the basis of the Yogacara school.

The Prophecy of His Coming

The scriptures describe precise conditions for Maitreya's descent. Human lifespans will have increased to 80,000 years. A universal king called Shankha will rule the world. The land will be peaceful and fertile. Only then will Maitreya descend. He will be born into a Brahmin family in the city of Ketumati, the future form of Varanasi, and will renounce the world as Shakyamuni did before him. He will attain enlightenment beneath a dragon flower tree. Then he will hold three great assemblies. The first alone will liberate ninety-six billion beings.

The Faithful and the Impatient

The prayer to be reborn during Maitreya's dispensation shaped monastic life for centuries. The Chinese monk Daoan and his community took formal vows in the fourth century to be reborn in Maitreya's time. Xuanzang, the seventh-century pilgrim who crossed Central Asia to retrieve Buddhist texts from India, made the same aspiration. Before Pure Land devotion to Amitabha became dominant in East Asia, Maitreya was the center of Chinese Buddhist devotion. Practitioners visualized him in his heavenly palace, recited his name, and cultivated the merit needed to join his assembly.

Not everyone was willing to wait. In 515 CE, a monk named Faqing led a rebellion claiming Maitreya's era had arrived. Similar uprisings continued through the White Lotus rebellions of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, with leaders proclaiming themselves Maitreya incarnate. Imperial authorities sometimes suppressed Maitreya worship as seditious.

Stone and Bronze

The colossal Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan included a 38-meter figure identified as Maitreya; the Taliban destroyed them in 2001. The 71-meter Leshan Giant Buddha in Sichuan, carved between 713 and 803 CE, also represents him. In Korea and Japan, sculptors carved Maitreya seated with one leg crossed and a hand raised to his cheek in contemplation. The gilt-bronze pensive Maitreya at the National Museum of Korea and the wooden Miroku at Koryu-ji in Kyoto both show him in this pose, quiet and considering.

The Laughing Buddha

In East Asian popular religion, Maitreya wears a different face. Budai, a rotund, laughing monk of the tenth century who carried a cloth sack and dispensed eccentric wisdom, was posthumously identified as Maitreya in human form. The identification stuck. In Chinese and Japanese temples, it is Budai's grinning figure, not the princely bodhisattva, that greets visitors at the gate.