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Maitreya

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Maitreya

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Miroku (Maitreya) in meditation, gilt bronze figure, Japanese, Asuka period, 7th century; in the …
(credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, 50.86)
In Buddhist tradition, the future Buddha who will descend to earth to preach again the dharma (law) when the teachings of the Buddha Gautama have completely decayed. Until then, Maitreya is believed to be a bodhisattva residing in the Tusita heaven. Mentioned in scriptures from the 3rd century AD, he is the earliest bodhisattva around whom a cult developed and is still the only one generally honored by the Theravada tradition. His images, found throughout the Buddhist world, convey an air of expectancy and promise.


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When Maitreya appears before the world people will realize that they have known Him from before, and that His teaching is not strange or beyond their level of thought.
Watercolour of the Maitreya temple, part of the fourteenth-century royal citadel of Tingmogang in Ladakh, from Tibetan Pilgrimage--Architecture of the Socred Land, by Michel Peissel, London: Abrams, 2005, [pounds sterling]19.
In his teaching the future Buddha refers not to the Buddhist messiah Maitreya, but to the inevitable realization by all of their own potential Buddhahood (pp.
 
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