What is Maitreya?
Maitreya is the future Buddha in Buddhist tradition. The name is Sanskrit from the root mitra (friend, kindness); in Pāli he is Metteyya. He is the bodhisattva currently residing in the Tuṣita heaven who will descend to take rebirth and become the next Buddha of this world, opening a new age of the Dharma after the present dispensation of Gautama Buddha ends. All major Buddhist schools, including Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna, share this expectation, though their accounts of his interim role differ.
The coming Buddha
In the standard Mahāyāna cosmology, Maitreya currently abides in the Tuṣita — the contented — deva-realm. The Tuṣita is the realm in which the bodhisattva destined to become the next Buddha of a given world-system waits until the conditions for his descent ripen. When that descent comes, it will open a new Buddhist dispensation: a new turning of the Dharma wheel after the present age that Gautama Buddha inaugurated in the fifth century BCE. The interval before Maitreya's arrival is canonically immense. The Theravāda Anāgatavaṃsa gives the figure of 5.6 billion years; Mahāyāna literature varies. The doctrinal weight of the teaching, though, is not chronological. Maitreya names the conviction that the present age — in which the Dharma exists but the living Buddha does not — is not permanent. All three main vehicles share this basic cosmology; the differences are in what role the figure plays in the interim.
Maitreyanātha and the Yogācāra transmission
The figure has a second function inside the textual history of the Yogācāra school. The traditional account, preserved in Paramārtha's sixth-century Chinese Life of Vasubandhu and in the later Tibetan histories of Bu-ston and Tāranātha, holds that Asaṅga undertook a twelve-year retreat at Kukkuṭapāda — Cock's Foot Mountain — to make direct contact with Maitreya in Tuṣita. The encounter finally occurred, the tradition says, and Maitreya transmitted the Five Treatises (Byams chos lnga in Tibetan) that became the school's scriptural foundation: the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra, the Madhyāntavibhāga, the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga, the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, and the Ratnagotravibhāga (also called the Uttaratantra). Modern scholarship has debated for over a century whether Maitreya here names the bodhisattva of eschatology, a historical Indian teacher sometimes called Maitreyanātha, or a literary device by which Asaṅga's school grounded its own authority. Western philological work by Frauwallner, Tucci, Tola, and Dragonetti has not produced a consensus. The tradition treats the question as undecidable in principle: the Five Treatises are authoritative regardless of how the transmission is historically reconstructed.
Where the figure appears in the index
No item in the corpus is recorded under Maitreya's name directly. The figure enters the index through the texts the tradition attributes to him. *The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna* carries the tathāgatagarbha and Buddha-nature doctrine of the Ratnagotravibhāga into the Chan, Zen, and Korean Sŏn inheritance; the index holds the Hakeda translation, the principal English-language edition. Junjirō Takakusu's *The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy* is the main twentieth-century English survey of the East Asian doctrinal schools that descend from the Yogācāra material the Maitreya treatises grounded. Thich Nhat Hanh's reflection on emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness and his teaching on Buddhist instruction and ultimate truth carry the Madhyāntavibhāga's middle-way analysis in Plum Village idiom. The seeds in the store consciousness image TNH returns to is drawn from the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra's schema of awakened qualities resting latent in the *ālayavijñāna* until the path surfaces them. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart* and her course on awakening compassion carry the same Buddha-nature claim in the Tibetan reception. The Uttaratantra is the standard text for the Tibetan curriculum's treatment of tathāgatagarbha, and Chödrön's teaching that ordinary mind is not a different substance from awakened mind rests on the doctrine the Tibetan reading of the Maitreya treatise unfolds.
Maitreya compared with adjacent figures
Maitreya is not the same as the historical Buddha. The Mahāyāna pantheon distinguishes the Buddha Śākyamuni — who lived and taught in northern India in the fifth century BCE — from Maitreya, whose arrival lies in the immeasurable future. Nor is Maitreya a messiah in the Abrahamic sense. There is no redemptive intervention in human history comparable to the messianic doctrines of the Mediterranean traditions, and the Buddhist eschatology does not claim that Maitreya's descent will resolve suffering for those present in the way those doctrines promise. Finally, Maitreya as cosmological figure is distinct from Maitreyanātha, the possible historical teacher whose identity the textual tradition may or may not have merged with the future Buddha. The Yogācāra literature holds both identities under the same name. The tradition is internally aware that the function of source of the Five Treatises is partly the school's own construction, whatever the historical figure behind the name.
