Maitreya (Pali Metteyya), whose name derives from maitri, loving-kindness, is the future Buddha, the being who, in a tradition shared across Buddhist schools, will appear in the world in a distant age to teach the Dharma anew when the teaching of the present Buddha has been wholly forgotten. Until then he is understood to abide as a bodhisattva in the Tushita heaven, awaiting his final birth. This gives Maitreya an unusual standing: he is revered by the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions alike, the one coming Buddha whose future advent is broadly agreed across otherwise divergent forms of Buddhism.
Maitreya's expectation is attested very early in Buddhist literature: the Pali Cakkavatti-Sihanada Sutta, part of the Digha Nikaya and among the older strata of the Theravada canon, already names a future Buddha called Metteyya who will arise in a future age of renewed prosperity and righteous kingship to teach the Dharma afresh, showing that the idea of a coming Buddha is not a later Mahayana innovation but present in some of the earliest recorded Buddhist teaching. Gandharan sculpture of the early centuries CE, from the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, provides some of the oldest surviving images of Maitreya, generally shown standing, princely and bejewelled, holding a small water flask, an iconography that predates his East Asian development by many centuries.