Introduction

i.1According to tradition, Maitreya is a bodhisattva said to be currently abiding in the Heaven of Joy (Skt. Tuṣita), whence he is prophesied to return to our continent of Jambudvīpa as the next buddha of this Fortunate Eon (Skt. bhadrakalpa). Maitreya was the first bodhisattva to inspire a devoted following in India, anticipating the later development of other bodhisattva cults, such as those of the bodhisattvas Avalokiteśvara and Mañjuśrī. The cult of Maitreya flourished in India as early as the first centuries of the Common Era, but the figure of Maitreya became especially popular in Central and East Asia, starting in the fourth century ᴄᴇ. Moreover, in his role as the future buddha, Maitreya has continued to play an important role in practically all forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism up to the present.

i.2The sūtra translated here, Maitreya’s Birth in the Heaven of Joy, is part of this larger tradition. It is one of the many sūtras in the Kangyur to have been translated into Tibetan from Chinese. This is immediately clear from the original title of the text, which is transcribed from Chinese rather than Sanskrit, and from the colophon, which indicates that the translation was produced based on a Chinese manuscript. The Tibetan translation corresponds to a sūtra in the Chinese canon titled (Fo shuo guan mile pusa shang sheng doushuaitian jing 佛說觀彌勒菩薩上生兜率天經, Taishō 452). Of the six sūtras in the Chinese canon that center on Maitreya (Taishō 452–57), this is the only one to focus on his “ascendant” rebirth in the Heaven of Joy, whereas the others are primarily concerned with his future descent to be reborn in Jambudvīpa.

i.3Maitreya’s Birth in the Heaven of Joy is also sometimes classified as one of six so-called visualization sūtras in the Chinese canon, all of which are thought to have been compiled around the first half of the fifth century ᴄᴇ (Yamabe 1999, 40–46; Quinter 2013). These six sūtras receive that label from the term “visualization” (觀, guan, sometimes also translated as “contemplation” or “meditation”), which appears at the beginning of each of their titles. This raises the question of just what visualization means in this context and how it functions specifically within each of these six texts. Several of these sūtras, including Maitreya’s Birth in the Heaven of Joy, lack detailed visualization instructions, leading some scholars to question whether they were in fact ever intended for visualization practices, or simply emerged within a general milieu of Maitreya worship and contemplation.

i.4As for the origins of these six visualization sūtras, although traditionally understood as translations of Sanskrit texts, there are today no extant Sanskrit sources, and there is also no mention of them in Indian literature in general or in the travelogues of the Chinese monks Faxian (337–ca. 422 ᴄᴇ) and Xuanzang (ca. 602–64 ᴄᴇ) documenting their visits to India. Moreover, the terminology used in these six sūtras is similar to that of indigenous Chinese meditation manuals composed around the same time. Such things suggest that these texts might not have been composed in India. Instead, there appears to be a growing consensus that they were first compiled in Central Asia, specifically in the Turfan region, around the first half of the fifth century ᴄᴇ (Quinter 2013). According to the colophon of the Chinese translation, this sūtra was translated in 455 ᴄᴇ by the Chinese translator Juqu Jingsheng (d. ca. 464), an exiled prince of Anyang who traveled to Khotan to study Buddhism and is said to have brought this sūtra back to China sometime after the Northern Wei invasion of the Northern Liang in 439. A Chinese commentary on the sūtra, of possible Tang provenance, was uncovered at Dunhuang.

i.5The Tibetan colophon does not provide much detail beyond the fact that it was translated from a Chinese manuscript by the editor-translator Venerable Pabtong and Venerable Sherab Sengé. These two translators are not widely mentioned in other works cataloging the Tibetan translations. The sūtra is also absent from the ninth-century Denkarma catalog (Tib. dkar chag ldan dkar ma), which lists the Tibetan translations that had been produced up to that point‍—an absence that indicates a later date of translation. In producing this translation, we took as our basis the Tibetan Degé xylograph version and compared it to the variant readings recorded in the Comparative Edition (Tib. dpe bsdur ma). Furthermore, we compared the Tibetan with the Chinese of Taishō 452. In terms of Western languages, the sūtra has recently been translated into German from Chinese by Heyryun Koh (2008). This publication also proved helpful for our work on several occasions.