Good morning, everyone. So we're a few weeks into our spring practice period. We've been focusing on the major Bodhisattva figures who represent aspects of Bodhisattva practice, practice of awakening beings, and each of these archetypal figures are complex characters who have various stories and show ways of looking at what our Bodhisattva practice is and can be. Today I want to talk about Maitreya, a very interesting and complex Bodhisattva figure. He's predicted to be the next future Buddha after Shakyamuni, who was the historical Buddha 2,500 years ago in what's now northeastern India. Maitreya or Mettayya in the Pali is one of the oldest, earliest Bodhisattva figures. Some of the images of Maitreya are as early as some, almost as

[01:23]

early as the Hellenic images of, first images of Shakyamuni. And so there are many, many stories about him. And he's a very complex character. But one of the basic things about Maitreya is that he was predicted by the Buddha to be the next future Buddha. So sometimes he's depicted as a Buddha. Sometimes he's depicted as waiting to become the next Buddha, sitting up in the meditative heaven, the Tushita heaven it's called, waiting to become the Buddha. So there's some images of him on the altar today. One of the most famous Japanese Buddhist sculptures on this side of the altar. So for those of you behind, you can come and see it later. But sitting with his finger to his chin, considering how to save all the suffering human beings. Beautiful statue. There's a version of that on this side by the painter, Buddhist painter Mayumi Oda, who does goddess images as the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. So there's a goddess Maitreya. And then there's Hotei, who I'll come to later, who was a

[02:48]

a historical monk in the 11th century, who was considered an incarnation of Maitreya. And I'll come back to him. But the story about him being predicted to be the next future Buddha. Well, there are various stories. And again, these stories are sort of mythological, or we don't know how much, how accurate they are historically, from the point of view of our understanding of history. But there were various stories about the Buddha predicting one of the monks in his congregation, oh, you'll this, this monk will be the next future Buddha. And the other monks were very surprised because this fellow Ajita was one of the names used was not particularly learned, not particularly a good meditator, not, you know, kind of foolish, not, you know, actually, in some of the Mahayana stories, they make fun of him. But he was known to be very kind. So because of that, the Buddha, presumably, the Buddha just considered him to be the next future Buddha.

[04:07]

So his name, Maitreya, or Maitreya, refers to a practice of loving kindness. So he's associated with loving kindness. So we sometimes chant the Metta Sutra, Sutra of Loving Kindness, which one of the key phrases may all beings be happy. So this Bodhisattva represents loving kindness and the wish for all beings to be happy, to be safe and joyous, and free from difficulty. So this is one quality of Maitreya, or Mettaya. Maitreya is the Sanskrit word for Metta. So this is the Bodhisattva of Loving Kindness, and again, the Bodhisattva who will be the next Buddha. And we don't know exactly when that will be, and that's an issue. So he represents questions about time and temporality.

[05:17]

Let me go back to the question of when and how, and the questions about him. So in the Lotus Sutra, for example, one of the early stories about him in the Mahayana, there's a story about him that that Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, who knows a great deal, tells a story early about this Bodhisattva in a past life being known as Fame Seeker, because he was always interested in being well-known, but he was also very kind. So there's various stories like that, kind of poking fun at this Bodhisattva. So somebody had asked one of our previous meetings about these Bodhisattvas and whether they are perfect, and a number of them have sort of flawed qualities, so that might be one that we could say for Maitreya.

[06:38]

And yet, he's the one who will be the next future Buddha. And the various, so each of the Bodhisattvas, a lot of the Bodhisattvas have particular meditation quality, meditation aspects. So sometimes there are visualization practices for the pure land that will be created when Maitreya becomes the next future Buddha. So when a Buddha becomes a Buddha, one of the things that's said to happen is that the land and the world that they live in also becomes a pure land, becomes a Buddha field. This is the basis of pure land Buddhism, which is the most popular form of Buddhism in East Asia, now referring to the Amida Buddha, Amitabha Buddha. But before Amida Buddha became popular, Maitreya Buddha's pure land was an object of veneration, and people visualize that. So there are lots of these folk stories.

[07:50]

One of them was of the great pilgrim Xuanzang, who was a historical figure who went from China to India to get, bring back sutras, and at one point, the story goes, he was captured by pirates. He was, he spent, I think, 17 years at Nalanda University in India, and brought back many sutras to China, was a very, very famous figure. But he was captured by pirates on the Ganges River, and they were, they thought, they saw that he was obviously very noble, notable monk, so they decided they would burn him and sacrifice to their god as a good offering. And so, as they were about to do this, he offered homage to all the Buddhas, and sat mindfully thinking about Maitreya, and visualizing his ascent into Maitreya's heaven.

[08:59]

And as he did this, suddenly a powerful storm arose and capsized all the boats and the sacrificial altar, and the pirates reconsidered their sacrifice. They realized this was not a good idea, and they all converted to Buddhism. So, you know, there's stories like that about many of these bodhisattvas. But there is a visualization exercises about Maitreya's future, there are many visualization exercises about Maitreya's future Pure Land. Another aspect of his meditation is that he's connected, so each of these bodhisattvas is connected to various schools and sutras. So it's a way, so looking at these different bodhisattvas is a way of seeing how the different branches of bodhisattva Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism fit together.

[10:03]

Maitreya is especially associated with the Yogacara branch of Buddhism, which is a kind of psychological study, very deep philosophical part of Buddhism. There was in some ways a response to the earlier focus on emptiness, it's a study of the self. So our founder of Soto Zen, Dogen, talks about the study of the way is to study the self. Maitreya is, I guess, connected with that because as he's sitting in the meditative heavens waiting to become the next future Buddha, and as he's pondering that, and the image of him sitting, one of the things is he sits what they call Western style with his, not in a lotus position, but like on a chair with his legs down, and he's sitting there.

[11:08]

Considering how we create suffering, so he considers the human mind and how we make discriminations, and so Yogacara school is about looking at consciousness, studying the self, and there's a very intricate and interesting study of the self that's part of Yogacara. Dividing consciousness into eight aspects, consciousness of the six senses, the sixth being with the five we know that we think of visual and sound and taste and smell and touch, but also mind consciousness. So you all know from sitting zazen that as we sit, thoughts arise. So in Buddhism, those are considered just sense objects, like the color of the wall as we're sitting.

[12:11]

Those thoughts come up and they're just sense objects. We tend to think that our thoughts are who we are, but for Buddhism, they're just like the traffic going by outside. So that's six, and then there's another one that is the sense of separation. So this is part of the Yogacara analysis of consciousness and how we create suffering, how we are separate from the world. So this sense of self and other is one of the aspects, one of the consciousnesses that is part of human consciousness. This sense of separation, subject and object, and it's part of how we function as human beings. And so this is part of the analysis in Yogacara. And then there's an eighth consciousness called alaya-vijnana, the storehouse consciousness. And so I'm not going into a whole talk about Yogacara, but just to mention this in the context of Maitreya, that this storehouse consciousness is kind of

[13:21]

where our karmic actions from the past take form and allow us to have our own particular spiritual tendencies. And so it's a complicated teaching, but it's the basis of our individual and collective karmic activity. So the point in terms of Maitreya is that because he is waiting to be Buddha and considering all of this, the Yogacara school took him as a particular bodhisattva that was important to Yogacara analysis. And some of the early Yogacara teachings, particularly their two brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu,

[14:28]

who were important Indian philosophers, Buddhist philosophers, there are many stories about how they were taught by Maitreya himself. And scholars questioned maybe there was an Indian teacher named Maitreya, or maybe they actually went up to some meditative heaven and spoke to Maitreya. So part of Maitreya, again, is this radical kindness, this loving kindness, Maitri. And part of Maitreya, so again, each of these figures, there's a lot of overlap. Kanon represents generosity, we've talked about a little bit. Samantabhadra, we'll talk about, represents a deliberate work in the world to be helpful to beings. Jizo, who we'll talk about, the earth matrix or earth womb, bodhisattva.

[15:33]

Dzong in Chinese represents witnessing to suffering beings in all the different realms. So there's a kind of overlap between these different bodhisattvas, but Maitreya particularly represents a kind of radical loving kindness, may all beings be happy. And particularly Maitreya people are very strong vegetarians. There's a story about a sangha and animals that's a little weird, maybe, but represents that. So a sangha, again, wrote many texts and had a teacher named Maitreyanatha, whose name means devotee of Maitreya. And some people say that a sangha went to the meditation heaven and

[16:34]

got direct teachings from Maitreya. But one story about a sangha is that a sangha spent 12 years in solitary meditation in a cave in the Himalayas. And he was doing practices involving visualization or devotion to Maitreya. So there are mantras that he did towards Maitreya, but also trying to visualize this Maitreya's future Buddha field. And these people who did this practice believe that if they could see this Buddha field, they would be reborn there. Maybe in the future when Maitreya was the Buddha on earth, or maybe even sooner. Anyway, in this story, after 12 years of intense practice without any evident result, a sangha departed his cave feeling very discouraged. He approached a town and then he encountered a dog whose lower body was being eaten by worms. Struck with sympathetic concern, a sangha realized that removing the worms would kill them,

[17:40]

but leaving them would lead to the dog's death. Immediately, a sangha decided to cut some flesh from his own body to feed the worms and remove them unharmed from the dog. He went to the town and traded his monk staff for a knife, then returned to the dog. After cutting some flesh from his thigh, the story goes, a sangha thought that if he picked the worms off the dog with his hands, they might also die. So the story goes, he determined to remove the worms from the dog with his tongue. At the moment he was about to proceed, the dog vanished, transformed into Maitreya in all his radiance. Overwhelmed with tears, a sangha asked him, why Maitreya appeared now when a sangha had abandoned hope of seeing him after all those years in the cave and had never manifested through all of a sangha's meditative exertions. Maitreya answered

[18:40]

that he had been near a sangha from the beginning, but a sangha's conditioning had made him unable to see. But thanks to a sangha's kindness to the dog and the worms, he was now able to behold Maitreya. Maitreya asked a sangha to carry him on his shoulders into the town. A sangha did so gladly, although the townspeople could only see a sangha carrying a smelly, infested mongrel. A sangha was then offered any wish by the brightly glowing Maitreya, and a sangha asked for guidance on how to disseminate the Mahayana teachings. Thereupon a sangha was transported to Maitreya's meditative heaven where he engaged in study with Maitreya. Sometime after that, a sangha returned to the human realm and established a monastic training center where he wrote down what he had learned. So this is, you know, these kinds of stories are, you know, kind of common in the Bodhisattva literature and you can, you know, take them as metaphoric or whatever. But, you know, this is an image of this radical loving kindness from a sangha.

[19:49]

So another key aspect of Maitreya is just that he will be the future Buddha, and we don't know when. So this brings up questions about the nature of time itself. Some versions of the story say that he will be the next future Buddha, maybe in what we call the year 4000. Other versions of the story say that he will be the future Buddha, maybe 500,000 years from now. So the point is that Maitreya is sitting up in the meditative heaven waiting to be Buddha. He knows he will be the next future Buddha as predicted, but he's still, he's a mere shadow of his future self. He's a not yet Buddha Bodhisattva.

[20:52]

So we don't know when Maitreya will come. And there are, you know, there's graffiti in the Himalayas saying, come Maitreya, come, we need you now. There are people who've claimed to be Maitreya or be precursors to Maitreya. There's a guy in London who says he's Maitreya. I don't know. Maybe he is. There's what Empress Wu claimed to be an avatar of Maitreya in China. So all through history, there have been these groups who were devoted to Maitreya. So there's a kind of historical quality of Maitreya. Not exactly messianic because there will be future Buddhas after Maitreya. So it's not the messiah in the western sense, but this looking towards the future. And this question about time and the future.

[21:57]

So this is another important part of who Maitreya is. Particularly in China, there was a strong kind of underground Maitreyan movement. Going back to I think the 600s or very, very far back. And so this Maitreya worship was sort of in some ways very subversive because if you're looking to Maitreya, that means you don't really trust the current dynastic emperor who's supposed to be like a representative of heaven. So these groups were often persecuted. And they were also very egalitarian. There were women leaders, which was unheard of in patriarchal China. And they were also included both Buddhists and Taoists and lay people and priests.

[23:00]

And so they were very syncretic. Often, one part of that was the White Lotus Movement. So this is another aspect of Maitreya. At times, mostly they were dedicated to healing and health functions. So the current Falun Gong movement is sort of spiritually descendant of that. But a lot of Chinese healing comes from these groups, healing practices. Sometimes they were overtly political. So there were Maitreyan forces that were part of overthrowing the Yuan or Mongol dynasty. And when the new Ming government consolidated power, the new Ming emperor who had been formerly part of this, who was peasant born and part of this Maitreyan veneration outlawed Maitreyan worship

[24:03]

because he knew how dangerous it was to his power. So there's this kind of underground looking towards Maitreya that implies a kind of dissatisfaction with the way things are, that we need another future Buddha. So that's another part of how Maitreya has been represented historically. So, again, very complicated figure. In terms of practices, so we've talked about the different bodhisattva practices, and each of the different bodhisattvas represents some combination of those. So I've already talked about meditation and the aspect of meditation that is studying the self, that's studying consciousness, that is part of the Yogacara meditation. And also generosity and the aspect of generosity,

[25:04]

that's just loving kindness, may all beings be happy, may they be joyous and live in safety as we chant in the Metta Sutta. But also patience. So if you think of Maitreya sitting up there in the meditation heaven, waiting to become the next future Buddha, maybe any day now or maybe not for a hundred thousand years, and he just doesn't know. So the radical practice of patience, just waiting. And patience as a practice is, you know, we think of just waiting as kind of passive, but it's as a practice, as a practice that we can do. Patience is not passive, it's an active dynamic practice, to be attentive and ready to be responsive and helpful for the sake of all beings. Requires a kind of steadiness and settledness and attentiveness

[26:07]

to see when there may be some way to be helpful. So there are many different aspects to Maitreya. And many of the Bodhisattvas have this, you know, kind of range of qualities. Again, as I've said for some of the other Bodhisattvas, historically, there are various figures who've been considered to be incarnations of particular Bodhisattvas. For example, His Holiness the Dalai Lama is officially considered to be in Tibetan Buddhism an incarnation of Chenrezig or Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. There's a little figure on the altar, Hotei or Budai in Chinese, who is based on an actual historical Chinese monk from the 1100s.

[27:15]

And you've all seen him. How many people have never been to a Chinese restaurant? Angie? No? So you've all seen him. He's the fat, jolly, laughing Buddha. And in China, he was considered to be Maitreya or in Chinese, Miloufei is the way to say Maitreya in Japanese, Miroku. So he, I guess that he was in the 10th century, excuse me, so the 900s in China. And this laughing Buddha, apparently this monk who just, you know, walked around in the streets. He wasn't part of any monastery. He just walked around. His name means cloth bag. And he carried this sack full of candies and toys for the children. So he's sort of like a scruffy Buddhist Santa Claus. He just, you know, played with the children and was just happy.

[28:21]

People could tell the weather by whether he was wearing sandals. If he was wearing sandals, then it was going to be raining. Otherwise, he would be barefoot. And there's lots of stories about him. But he's in the ox-herding pictures. He's the one who's in the final picture returning to the marketplace with empty, bliss-bestowing hands. So in China now, he's just considered Buddha. So if you go to Chinese Buddhist temples, you see there's images of Budai Miloufei. And they just say Buddha. So he's considered the equivalent of Buddha in China. And so, but this is really this historical person who was considered to be an incarnation, a human incarnation of Maitreya. And so there's numbers of stories about him.

[29:22]

Some more orthodox monk stopped him on the streets and says, to test him and asked him what was the fundamental meaning of the Buddha's teaching. So he just dropped his sack immediately, letting go of everything. And then the monk asked, well, what's the actualization of the teaching? So Hotei picked up his sack and went on his way. So there's lots of stories about him. Anyway, so we can have some discussion about him, but I'll just mention that in the book that I did on these Bodhisattva figures, I offer, and there's lots more folklore and stories about all of these figures, but I offered modern culture figure exemplars. And this is sort of my own speculation. And part of what you can do with all of these figures is think of people in your own life or people in the culture who you think

[30:26]

might represent aspects of Maitreya. But I'll just mention a couple that I mentioned in the book. One, well, there was a great American, one of the great American Zen poets is named Lew Welch. Does anybody know, anybody heard of Lew Welch? Yeah. Only one person raised their hands. Too bad. Lew Welch was a great poet. He was friends with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and Philip Leyland and Kerouac. And he was part of the beat poets. He lived in Bolinas and Bay Area. He wrote a poem called Ring of Bones that Gary Snyder named his Zendo after. I highly recommend picking up volumes of his poem. But he wrote, so this is in the context of, this was written in 1967. So I'm going to talk tomorrow about stuff that happened in the 60s.

[31:26]

But this is called Maitreya poem. At last in America, Maitreya, the coming Buddha will be our leader. And at last will not be powerful and will not be alone. Take it as a simple prophecy. Look into the cleared eyes of so many thousands young and think, maybe that one, that one, that one. Look out, the secret is looking out. And never forgetting there are phony ones and lost ones and foolish ones. Know this, Maitreya walks our streets right now. Each one is one. There are many of them. Look out for him, for her, for them, for these will break America as Christ cracked Rome. And just tonight, another one got born. So I talk about the flowered children and the rebellion against the Vietnam War

[32:31]

and people like Abbie Hoffman, who were doing things to expose the hypocrisy of America in the 60s and also people like Ram Dass. And anyway, as examples of Maitreya energy, also Thoreau going back further. And I'm going to talk tomorrow night about how I spent a night in jail with Abbie Hoffman. But and then there's people like John Chapman. Has anybody heard of John Chapman? Johnny Appleseed. Right. So a perfect example of Maitreya because he was looking towards the future. So he was on the frontiers when Ohio and Indiana were the frontiers in the first half of the 19th century and planting and cultivating apple tree nurseries and orchards for the coming frontier people.

[33:32]

And actually, apples at that time were not fruit to be eaten, but they were the source of sugar and the source of hard apple cider. They were the source of alcohol. He was a really interesting character in real life, apart from the legends, Swedenborgian minister. Anyway, so there are many figures who were looking to the future who represent this Maitreyan energy. One of my mentors, Joanna Macy, talked about in the context of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and now in terms of climate damage, concern about the future and trying to be friend future beings. So Maitreya is looking to the future. Maitreya is the next future Buddha. And how do we think about time and the ranges of time in which it may take before Maitreya becomes the next Buddha? And how do we consider how we take care of future beings right now?

[34:35]

Oh, I mentioned Lou Welch and I was going to mention that his stepson is a famous rock and roll performer, Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News. Some of you may have heard of Huey Lewis. Anyway, so there's a lot to say about Maitreya. Again, this basic loving kindness, this prediction to be the next future Buddha. And when we talk about the Malakirti, the great enlightened layman, we'll talk about how he challenged Maitreya about that. These visualization practices of Maitreya's future pure land, the whole Yogacara approach to Buddhist philosophy and meditation, which took Maitreya as a kind of example of. And this question of looking towards the future and considering the present and how the future may become a place for awakening.

[35:39]

Um, so I'll stop there. There's lots more to say, but comments, questions, responses, questions about Maitreya, Buddha. Yes, Tom. Good. Yeah. Heaven or something like that. I guess I've always thought of it like kind of in those terms. And second, um, if this, I mean, I kind of like take it and like, uh, when we talk about like the mythology of Maitreya and the future pure land or whatever, I take it that it's not important that we take any of this literally. So I'm just wondering if you could spell out a little more what you think the significance of us talking about this idea of Maitreya's pure land is.

[36:40]

Yeah. Well, you know, it's possible to, these stories about the Bodhisattvas, this folklore, to put it that way, about the Bodhisattvas and each of the different Bodhisattva figures we're talking about has a vast, I'm just giving you a few. There's lots and lots of folklore in different cultures. And actually they have different flavors in China and Tibet and Korea and Japan. But if you want to take it literally, you can. And popularly it's often taken literally, but also I think part of it is to see how they are understood as archetypal figures. So in that sense, to take it metaphorically is fine. And that brings up the whole question of whether these are, you know, cosmic external figures and in some sense they represent that, they represent forces out there, but also they're aspects of our own practice.

[37:41]

So when we consider these stories, how do we see our own practices of looking to the future of meditation on the aspects of consciousness, our own efforts at loving kindness, our own practice of patience, so when those come together, that sort of Maitreya energy, so we can see that as parts of our own practice or some parts of that. It may not be all of it, but some parts of that. So telling these stories is a way of thinking about our own story, about our own practice and informing our own story. So that was your second question, which I, and maybe there's more to say, but your first question was about Buddha fields and pure lands. And part of, this goes back to earliest Buddhism, the idea of Buddhakshetra, that when a Buddha awakens, there's a Buddha field that's constellated.

[38:45]

So this is true of Shakyamuni Buddha, but then later on this idea of a pure land. There are Buddha fields that are pure and Buddha fields that are less pure or impure. That's another aspect of it. But pure land Buddhism, which is one of the most popular forms of Buddhism, the most popular form in Japan and was very popular in most of Asia, is about, well, there are different ways that it's taken on. Sometimes people will call on Amida Buddha, hoping to be reborn into that Buddha field. Literally, in the future, there are one branch of pure land Buddhism in Japan. Maybe they did this in China too. Literally, when people are dying, they will hold on to a string that's attached to a picture of Amida Buddha and call on Amida Buddha to be carried into that Buddha field as they die, literally. But there's another branch of pure land Buddhism in Japan, Jodo Shinshu, where it's understood

[39:49]

that this is about seeing how to live in the pure land here, in this context, in this world. But even in our practice, and in Soto Zen, when Dogen says, when one person sits and fully displays in body and mind Buddha's position, all of space awakens, this is like saying that our practice is not just about our self-help. It's about seeing our relationship to the environment and that we have a relationship to the environment. So the idea of a Buddha field and a field of practice is, in different ways, I think, integral to Buddhist practice. I don't know if that... Do you have a follow-up question to either of those?

[40:51]

Okay. Other comments or questions about Maitreya or any aspect of Maitreya? Somebody had a question over here? Oh, Miriam, hi. Oh, good. Yes. That's great. Yes.

[41:53]

No, no, that's good, because that connects the Yogacara aspect of Maitreya with the loving-kindness and even kind of, you might say, silliness of Hotei. So yeah, this kind of... And the story about a sangha and the dog may seem creepy to some, but it's that kind of realm of just radical, not caring about self, but just taking care of all beings. So thank you. Yes, Douglas. It's kind of interesting that during the Christian period in Japan, in 16th and 17th century Japan, there was a show in Japan involving the Christian community, and it seems that that approach may be missing in the silence of this time.

[42:59]

Good movie. During that period, in any Christian country, one image that we keep is an old image of kind of a discipleship, maybe Maitreya, and it's exactly like the trees of the virgin and the virgin girls. And so we would keep those, and there's an object, a potion, and it's just kind of interesting the way that we saw this, and it's the motion between the two, and the connection of love and the experience of this person in the violence, it's very similar to what you call the violence of this person. Thank you. David. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between love and kindness and compassion? Can you talk about that?

[44:01]

Yeah. Well, compassion, well, when we talk about kanzeon, the bodhisattva of compassion, is hearing the cries of the world and just listening, and then the skillful means, reaching out to be helpful. Loving kindness is just, actually, there's a practice of metta which is just extending the wish to specific beings, first to those whom one already cares about, but then gradually to even those who one has trouble thinking of in that way. So it's just more, maybe it's more, well, at first it's more maybe mental, just expressing a wishing for loving kindness, but then it's also just being kind to people around. So they're related.

[45:04]

So thank you all, and again, each of these different bodhisattva figures, there's a lot of overlap, but they exist in the tradition as particular figures that have had resonance through different cultures. So we'll continue talking about them. Thank you.

[45:32]

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