The bodhisattva-individuality whose final earthly incarnation, c. 3000 CE, will herald the etheric Christ to humanity.
Maitreya Buddha in Anthroposophy is the bodhisattva-individuality whose final earthly incarnation, roughly 3,000 years after our time, will herald the reappearance of Christ in the etheric. Rudolf Steiner systematized this reading in the Jeshu ben Pandira cycle of November 1911 (GA 130), naming the same bodhisattva who lived a hundred years before Christ as Jeshu ben Pandira, who incarnates almost every century, and who will require 5,000 years from Gautama's enlightenment to ascend to the dignity of Buddha.
In Steiner's Own Words
Three thousand years after our present time will the Bodhisattva we have mentioned become the Buddha, and his teaching will then cause impulses to stream directly into humanity. He will be the One whom the ancients foresaw: the Buddha Maitreya, a Bringer of Good. He has the mission of preparing humanity in advance so that it may understand the true Christ Impulse: He has the mission of directing men's eyes more and more to that which men can love, to bring it about that what men can spread abroad as a theory shall flow into a moral channel so that at length all that men can possess in the form of thoughts shall stream into the moral life.
What it Means Today
Steiner adopted the Mahayana title and read it through anthroposophic Christology. The Maitreya is not a second Christ, and Steiner was emphatic on this point. The Christ-Being undergoes one earthly incarnation, the Mystery of Golgotha. The Maitreya is the bodhisattva who prepares the human capacity to recognize Christ in etheric form, the reappearance Steiner placed beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the third millennium. The Maitreya works through the moral power of speech, the larynx transformed into an organ capable of transmitting moral impulses from soul to soul, an organ Steiner said our present larynx is not yet able to produce.
This reading runs directly against the Theosophical Society's Maitreya programme, which through Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater identified Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle for the World Teacher in the 1910s and 1920s. Steiner criticized the identification publicly during the same years the GA 130 lectures were given, and his withdrawal from the German Section of the Theosophical Society in 1912-1913 was bound up with this dispute. Sergei Prokofieff's later anthroposophic research, particularly in his Rudolf Steiner and the Founding of the New Mysteries, traces the Maitreya stream as the herald of the etheric Christ rather than as a returning physical World-Teacher. Researchers working from the Goetheanum in Dornach have read GA 116 to GA 130 as a single bodhisattva-cycle in which the Jeshu ben Pandira individuality, the Maitreya-to-be, and the relation to Christian Rosenkreuz form one connected karmic stream. The practical consequence for the reader is that any claim of an already-arrived Maitreya in our century, by anthroposophic measure, would not be the Buddha-incarnation Steiner pointed to but at most one of the bodhisattva's almost-every-century incarnations, and would be marked, Steiner said, by the individuality being unknown until a sudden change between the thirtieth and thirty-third year. Maitreya's bodhisattva-stream connects to the Eight-Membered Path, Steiner's reading of Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path as the eight preparatory virtues for the modern initiate.
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