Maitreya: The Future Buddha

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Maitreya (Pali: Metteyya) is the future Buddha — the being who, the tradition holds, will become the next fully awakened Buddha of our world long after the teaching of the present Buddha has been forgotten. He is described as a bodhisattva now abiding in the Tushita heaven, waiting for the distant age when he will appear, rediscover the lost Dharma, and proclaim it anew. His name comes from a word for loving-kindness.

A name that means kindness

The name Maitreya is built from the Sanskrit maitrī (Pali: mettā) — “loving-kindness,” “friendliness,” “benevolence.” It is the very same quality that practitioners cultivate in mettā meditation. As Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, the name derives from this root, and the figure is associated above all with boundless goodwill toward beings.

Across the Buddhist world he carries different names in different tongues: Metteyya in Pali, Milefo in Chinese, Miroku in Japanese, and Byams-pa, “the Loving One,” in Tibetan. The thread running through all of them is the same — the coming Buddha is, before anything else, the embodiment of kindness.

Why there is a “future” Buddha at all

To understand Maitreya, it helps to recall how Buddhist tradition sees the Buddha himself. Gautama — the historical Buddha — is not regarded as the only Buddha ever to appear, but as one in a long line of Buddhas stretching back through immense spans of time. A Buddha, in this view, is someone who rediscovers the path to liberation after it has been completely lost to the world, and then teaches it again.

This is the key to the whole idea. A Buddha’s teaching does not last forever. Over vast ages the Dharma is gradually forgotten, until eventually no trace of it remains and no one even knows that awakening is possible. When that has happened — and only then — the conditions are ripe for a new Buddha to arise, discover the truth afresh, and turn the wheel of the Dharma once more.

Maitreya is that next Buddha. He is the one who will do for a future age what Gautama did for ours.

What the earliest texts say

The first appearance of Maitreya in the Pali Canon is in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (DN 26), “The Lion’s Roar on the Turning of the Wheel.” This discourse tells a long story about the cyclical rise and fall of human morality, and how the human lifespan lengthens and shortens along with it.

In the sutta’s account, human life decays to a catastrophic low and then slowly recovers as people return to virtue. As conditions improve over enormous stretches of time, the human lifespan climbs back up until it reaches 80,000 years. It is in that far-future age of flourishing — not in a time of darkness — that the next Buddha appears. The text says plainly that a Buddha named Metteyya will arise in the world, fully awakened, leading a monastic Sangha numbering in the thousands, just as the present Buddha leads his own community now.

This is striking and worth pausing on: in the early text, Maitreya comes not to rescue a wretched world but to teach a flourishing one. The “forgetting” of the Dharma and the coming of the next Buddha are separated by an almost unimaginable gulf of time.

Beyond DN 26, the Theravada tradition names him elsewhere too — in chapter 28 of the Buddhavaṃsa (the “Chronicle of Buddhas”), and at length in the later Pali poem the Anāgatavaṃsa (“Chronicle of the Future Buddha”), which is devoted entirely to his life and career. So while devotion to Maitreya never became central in Theravada practice, the figure himself is firmly rooted in its scriptures.

Waiting in the Tushita heaven

Where is Maitreya now? The tradition’s answer is that he abides as a bodhisattva in the Tushita heaven — one of the celestial realms in Buddhist cosmology, among the heavens of the desire-world within the wider map of the six realms of rebirth.

Tushita has a special role: it is said to be the realm where a bodhisattva destined for Buddhahood dwells in his penultimate life, immediately before the final birth in which he will awaken. The texts hold that Gautama himself descended from Tushita to take his last human birth. Maitreya, by the same pattern, waits there now — a bodhisattva of immense attainment, biding his time across the ages until the world is ready to receive a Buddha again.

It is important to be precise here. Tushita is a long-lived heaven, but in Buddhist terms it is still within saṃsāra — not nirvana, and not a final destination. A being reborn there still lives within the round of birth and death. What makes it significant is simply that the next Buddha is said to dwell there, poised between this life and his last.

Maitreya in Mahayana devotion

While both major traditions accept Maitreya, it was in Mahayana Buddhism that devotion to him flowered. Maitreya is among the earliest bodhisattvas around whom a distinct cult of devotion grew up; Britannica notes he is mentioned in scriptures from the 3rd century CE, and he is the only bodhisattva generally honoured even by the Theravada tradition.

In Mahayana settings, that devotion took several forms. Some practitioners aspired to be reborn in the Tushita heaven themselves, so as to be present with Maitreya, learn from him directly, and accompany him when he finally descends to become a Buddha. (This is a distinct aspiration from rebirth in a Pure Land such as Amitābha’s Sukhāvatī, the focus of Pure Land Buddhism, though the two devotions can look similar from the outside.)

Maitreya also occupies an important place in the history of Buddhist thought. According to long-standing tradition, the great Indian master Asaṅga — a founder of the Yogācāra school, around the 4th century CE — received teachings directly from Maitreya in the Tushita heaven. A set of texts known as the Five Treatises of Maitreya is attributed to this transmission and remains foundational in the Yogācāra tradition and across Tibetan Buddhist study. Whether one reads this as a literal heavenly revelation or as a traditional way of crediting an inspired body of work, it shows how central Maitreya became to later Buddhist philosophy.

The Laughing Buddha is a later identification

Many people who have never heard the name Maitreya nonetheless know his most popular image — though almost always without realising it. The rotund, bald, broadly smiling “Laughing Buddha” found in restaurants, shops, and homes across the world is, in East Asian tradition, a form of Maitreya. But this is a later folk identification, and the history matters.

The cheerful figure is Budai (Japanese: Hotei), originally a real Chinese monk named Qieci, traditionally said to have died in 917 CE, in the Later Liang period. He was remembered as an eccentric, generous wanderer who carried a cloth sack — budai means “cloth bag” — and gave away whatever he collected. Over time, popular and devotional tradition came to regard this joyful, big-bellied monk as an earthly manifestation of Maitreya, and his image became the familiar Laughing Buddha of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese culture.

So the smiling statue is genuine within East Asian Buddhism — but it is a folk development many centuries after, and very different in character from, the dignified bodhisattva of the early Indian texts, who is typically depicted seated in a regal posture awaiting his future descent. The two images, the serene Indian bodhisattva and the laughing Chinese monk, are both “Maitreya,” but they come from very different streams of the tradition.

Honest about legend and history

Maitreya sits at an interesting boundary. The idea of a future Buddha is woven deep into the earliest strata of the canon, in discourses attributed to the Buddha himself. But the rich body of prophecy, devotion, iconography, and folk legend that surrounds Maitreya developed over many centuries and across many cultures. A careful reader holds these apart: what the early text actually says (a future Buddha named Metteyya will arise in an age of an 80,000-year lifespan) is one thing; the later Tushita devotions, the Asaṅga revelation, and the Laughing Buddha are each distinct, later layers.

None of this diminishes the figure. If anything, it clarifies him. Maitreya expresses a quietly hopeful conviction at the heart of the tradition: that the path to awakening, however long it may be lost, is never lost forever — that goodness and wisdom will arise again in the world, embodied in a Buddha whose very name means loving-kindness.

For the life of the Buddha who taught the path we have now, see who was the Buddha?; for the goal he pointed to, what is nirvana?; and for the tradition where devotion to Maitreya grew richest, Mahayana Buddhism.