Maitreya

Maitreya is the "future Buddha" of Buddhist tradition, the next enlightened one who will appear in this world after the teaching of the present Buddha, Gautama, has wholly disappeared. He is the central figure of Buddhist eschatology: not a destroyer of the world but the restorer of the Dharma at the start of a renewed age.

The coming

In the early Pali texts, Maitreya is a bodhisattva currently dwelling in the Tushita heaven, who will be reborn as a human when the time is right. When the human lifespan has lengthened again (the Cakkavatti-Sihanada Sutta ties his coming to a re-growth of human virtue after a dark age) and the Dharma has been forgotten, he will attain enlightenment under a tree, turn the wheel of the teaching, and establish a long age of practice and realization. His name is often connected to maitri, "loving-kindness."

A Buddhist savior?

Maitreya is sometimes described as the Buddhist counterpart to the returning Christ or the Kalki avatar, but the comparison only goes so far. He does not judge the dead or end the cosmos. He re-opens the path that has closed. In a tradition whose deepest goal is release from the cycle of rebirth, Maitreya's role is to make that release available again after a period in which it had been lost. He is a restorer, not a redeemer.

Maitreya in practice

Devotion to Maitreya is ancient and wide. Images of Maitreya appear in early Indian art (Gandhara), in the cave-temples of Ajanta, and across the Buddhist world. In several East Asian contexts he took on a popular, even millenarian, form: the "Laughing Buddha" of Chinese folk art (actually a later monk, Budai) is often confused with him, and messianic movements in Chinese Buddhism have proclaimed a "Maitreya Buddha" who would usher in a new age. The expectation of his coming has, at moments, become a political eschatology of the kind seen in other traditions' remnant movements.

The difference

Maitreya marks what is distinctive about Buddhist eschatology: its end is the fading of a teaching, not the ending of a world. The comfort offered is not that the cosmos will be saved at the last day, but that the path out of suffering will be taught again. In a corpus full of fires, floods, and final battles, Maitreya is the figure who arrives with a teaching instead of a weapon.

The full narrative of the coming Buddha is told under Maitreya: the Future Buddha.