Tushita

Tushita takes its name from tushti, contentment, and the etymology is doctrinally exact. It is the fourth of the six sense-sphere heavens, well below the grandest of them, and the tradition's descriptions dwell not on its splendor, though it has the standard celestial furniture, but on the temper of its inhabitants: they are satisfied, delighting in what they have rather than reaching for more. That temper is why the heaven matters.

In Buddhist cosmology the higher sense-sphere heavens are morally hazardous precisely because of their pleasures; gods there are described as intoxicated, heedless, playing until their merit runs dry. Tushita sits at the sweet point where reward has not yet curdled into distraction, and the tradition made it, accordingly, the bodhisattva's address. It is also, in narrative terms, a working heaven: the texts show its residents attending to the Dharma, and later devotional literature pictures Maitreya preaching there in a jeweled pavilion to assemblies awaiting the far future with him. Rebirth in Tushita became a live aspiration across Buddhist Asia, championed in East Asia as a nearer and homelier goal than the Pure Land of Amitabha: not an exit from samsara but excellent seats within it, in the company of the one who will teach the way out next.

The role Tushita plays in the biography of Buddhas is fixed and formal, part of what the tradition calls the career every Buddha follows. Before his final birth, the being who would become Gautama dwelt in Tushita; the texts narrate the five great observations by which he surveyed the world from there, choosing the continent, the country, the family, the mother and the time for his descent, and his entry into Queen Maya's womb, dreamed by her as a white elephant, is the point at which the heaven hands its resident to history.

The pattern now repeats. Maitreya, the bodhisattva who will be the next Buddha, is held to reside in Tushita at present, and the arithmetic of the heaven measures the wait: a day in Tushita equals four hundred human years, and a lifespan there runs four thousand celestial years, which the commentaries multiply out to place his coming in a remotely distant future, after the Dharma of the present Buddha has been wholly forgotten. This made Tushita the anchor of Buddhist futurism.

Aspirants from Theravada kings to Chinese pilgrims vowed rebirth there to descend with Maitreya; the scholar Xuanzang, returning from India, is recorded as directing his dying aspiration to Tushita; and cults of ascent to Maitreya's presence flourished for centuries alongside, and in rivalry with, the westward hope of Amitabha's Pure Land. The heaven of the contented is thus also the heaven of expectation, Buddhism's waiting room for the next turning of the wheel.