Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Buddhism in Translations - § 102. The Buddhist Apocalypse.

Henry Clarke WarrenPali Canon TranslationsTheravada Buddhism

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This is a scholarly translation of a 19th-century Pali manuscript — a mixed prose-and-verse recension of the *Anāgata-vaṃsa* ("History of Future Events") — presented by Prof. J. Minayeff in the 1886 *Journal of the Pāli Text Society*. The text is structured as a dialogue in which the Buddha responds to the disciple Sāriputta's question about the future Buddha Metteyya (Maitreya), first tracing Metteyya's past lives and then describing the long decline of the Dharma before his coming. That decline unfolds in five sequential "disappearances": spiritual attainments, monastic practice, Buddhist learning (with a remarkably specific reverse-order erasure of the Pali canon, from the Abhidhamma down to single four-line verses), the outward symbols of monkhood, and finally the physical relics of the Buddha. A notably distinctive feature is the precision with which textual loss is mapped — specific books named in the order they will vanish — culminating in a scene where a king offers a fortune for anyone who can recite a single verse and finds no one. The text closes with a pragmatic soteriology: a detailed list of the ordinary meritorious acts (giving flowers, listening to stories, honoring parents) that will earn a person the chance to hear Metteyya's teaching and attain liberation. It is a primary source of interest to scholars of Theravāda eschatology, Buddhist textual transmission, and the cult of Maitreya.

Buddhism in Translations - § 102. The Buddhist Apocalypse.

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