The coming Buddha
Maitreya — Sanskrit from the root mitra, friend or kindness, and Metteyya in the Pāli — names the bodhisattva whom the Buddhist tradition holds will become the next Buddha of this world. In the standard Mahāyāna cosmology Maitreya currently abides in the Tuṣita — the contented — deva-realm in which the bodhisattva destined to become the next Buddha of a given world-system is held to wait until the conditions for his descent ripen. The descent, when it comes, will inaugurate the next Buddhist dispensation in this world: a new turning of the wheel, after the eventual fading of the present Buddhist age that Gautama Buddha inaugurated in the fifth century BCE. The interval between the historical Buddha's parinirvāṇa and Maitreya's eventual appearance is canonically given as immense — the Theravāda Anāgatavaṃsa gives the figure of 5.6 billion years; the Mahāyāna literature varies — but the operative point of the doctrine is not chronological. It is that the present Buddhist age is one in which the Dharma exists but the living Buddha does not, and that the figure of Maitreya names the conviction that this absence is not permanent. The same cosmological structure is shared across Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna; the differences across schools are about what role the figure plays in the meantime, between the historical Buddha's departure and his own future descent.
Maitreyanātha and the Yogācāra transmission
The figure has a second and partly independent 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, in the fourth century, undertook a twelve-year retreat at Kukkuṭapāda — Cock's Foot Mountain — in pursuit of direct contact with Maitreya, then resident in Tuṣita. The encounter, the tradition says, finally occurred, and Maitreya transmitted to Asaṅga the Five Treatises (Byams chos lnga in Tibetan) that became the school's scriptural foundation: the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra (Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras), the Madhyāntavibhāga (Discrimination of Middle and Extremes), the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga (Discrimination of Phenomena and Suchness), the Abhisamayālaṃkāra (Ornament of Realisation), and the Ratnagotravibhāga / Uttaratantra (Treatise on the Buddha-Lineage). Modern scholarship has spent more than a century on the question of whether Maitreya in this account names the bodhisattva of Mahāyāna eschatology, a historical Indian teacher (sometimes labelled Maitreyanātha) of the same name whose identity was conflated with the future Buddha in later tradition, or a literary device by which Asaṅga's school transmitted its own self-understanding under the authority of the cosmologically central figure. The Western philological reconstructions (Frauwallner, Tucci, Tola and Dragonetti) have not produced a consensus. The operative tradition treats the question as undecidable in principle: the corpus is authoritative regardless of how the transmission is historically reconstructed, and the Five Treatises function as the doctrinal floor of the Yogācāra school whether the Maitreya who delivered them was the cosmological bodhisattva, a historical teacher in his name, or a literary stabiliser inside Asaṅga's own composition.
Where the figure appears in the index
No item in the corpus is recorded under Maitreya's name as such. The figure enters the index through the downstream weight of the texts the tradition attributes to him. *The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna* is the East Asian text most directly carrying the tathāgatagarbha / Buddha-nature doctrine of the Ratnagotravibhāga — one of the Five Treatises — into the Chan, Zen and Korean Sŏn inheritance, and the index carries the Hakeda translation that remains the principal English-language edition. Junjirō Takakusu's *The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy* is the principal twentieth-century English-language 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 how true Buddhist instruction takes us directly to ultimate truth carry the Madhyāntavibhāga's middle-way analysis in Plum Village idiom — the seeds in the store consciousness image TNH returns to is the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra's schema of awakened qualities resting latent in the *ālayavijñāna* until the path's conditions surface them. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart* and her course on awakening compassion operate inside the Tibetan reception of the same Buddha-nature claim — the Uttaratantra is the standard textbook for the Tibetan curriculum's treatment of tathāgatagarbha, and the recognition that ordinary mind, even at its most contracted, is not a different substance from awakened mind is the doctrine the Tibetan reading of the Maitreya treatise unfolds.
What he isn't
Maitreya is not interchangeable with the historical Buddha. The Mahāyāna pantheon distinguishes the Buddha Śākyamuni (the figure who lived and taught in northern India in the fifth century BCE and whose parinirvāṇa the Buddhist tradition takes as the closing of the historical teaching career) from Maitreya as cleanly as the European calendar distinguishes a past century from a future one. Nor is the figure a messiah in the Abrahamic sense — there is no comparable claim of redemptive intervention in human history, and the Buddhist eschatology Maitreya inhabits does not assume the descent will resolve human suffering for its hearers in the way the messianic doctrines of the Mediterranean traditions assume. The figure is also not unique to Mahāyāna — the Anāgatavaṃsa preserves the same expectation inside the Theravāda canon, and Maitreya / Metteyya appears in the early Pāli literature as the predicted next Buddha of this world. What distinguishes the Mahāyāna reception is the second function the figure acquires as the cosmological source of a specific philosophical corpus — the Five Treatises that grounded the Yogācāra school's articulation of mind, perception and the path. The bodhisattva-of-the-future is the same figure as the source-of-the-Maitreya-treatises, but the two functions are doctrinally distinct, and the tradition is internally aware that the second function is largely the construction of the school the figure's authority was being invoked to ground.
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