Buddhas of the Henro: Miroku

An image of Maitreya on Mt. Kōya...frozen in time?

I can remember once when I was in fifth grade, my science teacher told us about the life cycle of stars. “Some go supernova and explode, others slowly swell up and turn red. Most scientists think our sun will probably turn into a red giant too–in five billion years it might even swallow the earth!”

A collective gasp went up from the class. My teacher chuckled as she reassured us. “Guys, five billion years is longer than the earth has been around. You don’t have to worry about it.” My classmates and I laughed, relieved. 

This was at a Catholic school, a famously “one-and-done” religion where one’s short time on this earth determines their eternal fate thereafter. High risk, high reward. 

So perhaps that’s why I’ve been putting this article off for so long. Miroku Bosatsu (the Japanese pronunciation of his Sanskrit name, Maitreya) is easy to put off. He's the Buddha of the future, scheduled to make his appearance 5.67 billion years from now, right around the time the sun swallows the earth. My automatic reaction to the crazy long scale of time so commonplace in Indian religious texts is often just to ignore them. Even now, Maitreya sometimes feels like something I don't have to worry about. Old habits die hard.

But that's not the Mahayāna approach. A striking line in one of esoteric Buddhism’s many ritual texts goes, “A practitioner should cast off their body, practice with courageous diligence, cherish the mind of compassion, and not grow tired of birth and death.”

Not grow tired of birth and death. In other words, hang in there for another 5.67 billion years, or longer, until everyone is awakened. That’s the mission a bodhisattva takes up when they say, “Beings are numberless; I vow to save them all.” As long as it takes, I will be there in the muck of existence. I will not turn tail and run.

Kūkai wrote in his Secret Key to the Heart Sūtra that “When the Wise Ones speak, they wait for the time, and wait for the person.” The Sūtra of Maitreya's Ascending Birth says that Maitreya was a person who died shortly after the Buddha did, so close to Awakening that he only has enough karmic juice for one more rebirth. He vowed to Shakyamuni that this rebirth would be as the Buddha Maitreya. So he's ready to go , waiting for the perfect coalescence of his presence, people's readiness, and ideal timing.

The good news is that the right time will come, whether tomorrow, 5.67 billion years from now under Maitreya Buddha's tutelage in a sci-fi city-planet version of our world (as described in another Maitreya Sūtra) or sometime after that. The Buddha's teaching in the Lotus Sūtra is pretty clear—anyone who encounters his Teachings is guaranteed to attain Buddhahood. But he never said it would be fast or easy.

So in the meantime, how can we not tire of birth and death? It sucks. Technology makes it nearly impossible to run from the fact that the world is a cruel, violent place, a constant race between human stupidity and human greed to the finish line of calamity, played out on an earth that kills thousands with the planetary equivalent of a twitching eyelid. Even if we avoid or ignore global catastrophe, personal disaster will strike. And if you buy the Buddhist teaching of rebirth, just when you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, you get to do it all again someplace else, until we all get it right.

Kūkai debates his parents in the 1983 film Kūkai—a scene loosely based on Indications of the Three Teachings

Kūkai's lifelong journey with Maitreya started exactly with this realization. He was a rich boy

set on an escalator to a cushy job by his connected uncle. But at 18 he realized there was nothing in it to satisfy him—sickness, aging, and death were coming. So he set his sights on Maitreya. In a text he wrote when he just twenty-four, the Indications of the Three Teachings, his idealized alter-ego says: 

“My master is Shakyamuni, whose vows are tremendously deep…On his last day on earth, he instructed Maitreya that [he] would be the Buddha of the future, and that other disciples should assist him and devote themselves to the salvation of all sentient beings…When I heard this message, I fed my horse, greased my carriage wheels, and set out on the road toward his capital in Tuṣita…now 24 years have passed without reaching my goal.”

The Maitreya of Kōryū-ji, Kyōto's first temple (Public Domain). I visited Kōryū-ji as research for this article, and was astonished by the incredible emotive power of this image. It doesn't quite come across on photos—visit on your next trip to Kyōto.

Kūkai was far from alone in placing rebirth in Tuṣita, "The Heaven of Joy," at the center of his Buddhist quest. Tuṣita is the celestial green room where Maitreya dwells until his final act. He and most Buddhists of his day initially believed that they’d achieve Buddhahood far, far in the future. Many believed it was best to shoot for an ideal place to practice like Tuṣita. This remains an important Buddhist approach, especially of the Pure Land schools centered on the Buddha Amida.

The Sūtra of Maitreya’s Ascending Birth, makes it clear that Maitreya leaves the door open to pretty much any sincere practitioner who encounters him. This kind of faith in Maitreya spread in Japan very early. One of Japan’s most celebrated sculptures, the image of Maitreya at Kōryū-ji, dates to the 600s, two centuries before Kūkai wandered around Shikoku.

Maitreya remained an important part of Kūkai's thought and practice after he returned to Japan from China, now the Patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism. The deity is, after all, one of the central deities of the Womb Realm Mandala, so we can safely say that Maitreya remained a lifelong friend.

But Kūkai brought back with him an unshakeable conviction that, by Esoteric practice, one could attain "Buddhahood in this very lifetime." This radical idea completely changed Kūkai's approach, and Japanese Buddhism as a whole.

It's no surprise then that Kūkai's relationship to Maitreya shifted and matured by his final years. Rather than emphasizing the “rebirth in Tuṣita” part of his youthful yearnings, he increasingly emphasized devoting himself to the salvation of sentient beings—the activity of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

This reached its peak in a vow he made at a ritual three years before his death. Here he promised, “Until [infinite] space is exhausted, until [numberless] sentient beings are exhausted, until [the unmeasurable realm of] Nirvāna itself is exhausted, my vow [to save all beings] shall not be exhausted.” 

In his Great Vow, Kūkai has transitioned from shooting for Maitreya as yet another kind of escape from samsara, to taking on Maitreya’s qualities for himself. The Vow is the common ground where he and Maitreya become one—no need to wait until after death. To enact this vow perfectly, fearlessly, and unimpeded by delusion is what he means by “becoming a Buddha in a single lifetime.” 

So how do we avoid growing tired of birth and death?

The answer is, well, Maitreya, whose name means “The One of Loving-Kindness.” The first step in this process is to do as Kūkai did in his youth. We embrace the sense that, in our current state of mind, another lifetime of this shit would be too much. We want to cultivate wisdom and compassion, we want to become able to help others, we want to move toward Awakening. So we set our sights on Tuṣita, or Amida’s Western Pure Land, or someplace far away.

But while 5.67 billion years may be far away, Maitreya is not. He is, to borrow Kūkai's phrase, "within your mind, close as can be." Maitreya's inexhaustible reservoir of compassion, patience, and care are qualities of your own mind, waiting to be noticed and actualized. It doesn’t happen overnight–the Buddha compared spiritual progress to the way a carpenter’s thumb wears down the handle of his tools. But eventually, the metal gleams forth from beneath the wood, revealing what was there all along. We gradually transition from focusing on what will happen someday to what can I do with this body, this mind, right now, to benefit all beings. We grow into the reality of Maitreya.

The Siddham character Yu, at the bottom of a Henro's suge-gasa, sedge hat.

This is all summed up very beautifully in the temple song of Jōraku-ji, Temple 14. While Jōraku-ji is the only temple with Maitreya as its main image on the Henro, his close association with Kōbō Daishi means you'll find him everywhere. The Siddham letter Yu, which is written on the front of a pilgrim’s straw hat and other equipment, is the seed syllable which embodies Maitreya.

But anyway, the song:

You will one day arrive

on that far off Other Shore

of Abiding Joy

if you swiftly climb aboard

the raft of his Expansive Vow.

And if you don’t believe it…well, we’ve all got plenty of time to find out.