Maitreya

Maitreya (Pali Metteyya), whose name derives from maitri, loving-kindness, is the future Buddha, the being who, in a tradition shared across Buddhist schools, will appear in the world in a distant age to teach the Dharma anew when the teaching of the present Buddha has been wholly forgotten. Until then he is understood to abide as a bodhisattva in the Tushita heaven, awaiting his final birth. This gives Maitreya an unusual standing: he is revered by the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions alike, the one coming Buddha whose future advent is broadly agreed across otherwise divergent forms of Buddhism.

Maitreya's expectation is attested very early in Buddhist literature: the Pali Cakkavatti-Sihanada Sutta, part of the Digha Nikaya and among the older strata of the Theravada canon, already names a future Buddha called Metteyya who will arise in a future age of renewed prosperity and righteous kingship to teach the Dharma afresh, showing that the idea of a coming Buddha is not a later Mahayana innovation but present in some of the earliest recorded Buddhist teaching. Gandharan sculpture of the early centuries CE, from the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, provides some of the oldest surviving images of Maitreya, generally shown standing, princely and bejewelled, holding a small water flask, an iconography that predates his East Asian development by many centuries.

Devotion to Maitreya has taken many forms. In East Asia he became enormously popular, and from around the tenth century he was widely identified with the jovial, big-bellied Budai (Hotei in Japan), the laughing wandering monk of Chinese folklore whose image is the familiar Laughing Buddha. Belief in his coming has also carried a political charge: at several points in Chinese history movements proclaiming that Maitreya's advent was at hand fed millenarian and rebel currents. In Buddhist art he is often shown seated in the European fashion, both feet on the ground as if ready to descend, or standing; and across the Buddhist world he presides as the embodiment of hope, the promise that the teaching, however far it declines, will one day be renewed.

Among the most monumental images of Maitreya anywhere is the Leshan Giant Buddha in Sichuan, China, a seated stone figure some 71 metres tall carved directly into a cliff face over some ninety years, from 713 to roughly 803 CE, and generally identified by tradition and inscription as Maitreya rather than Shakyamuni; it remains the largest stone Buddha statue in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage site, a scale of devotion that reflects how central hope for Maitreya's eventual coming became in medieval Chinese Buddhism, quite apart from the later, more informal popularity of the separate laughing Budai image in folk religion.