These eschatological Buddhist groups began to appear in China from 402 CE on (Overmyer 46), and escalated in number and intricacy from the Sui until the Song dynasty.
Once Buddha, he will rule over the Ketumati Pure Land, an earthly paradise associated with the Indian city of Varanasi or Benares in Uttar Pradesh.
Maitreya will achieve complete enlightenment during his lifetime, and following this reawakening, he will bring back the timeless teaching of dharma to this plane.
[citation needed] In the Sattasūriya sutta (sermon of the "Seven Suns") in the Aṅguttara Nikāya [AN 7.66] of the Pali Canon,[6] the Buddha describes the ultimate fate of the world in an apocalypse that will be characterized by the consequent appearance of seven suns in the sky, each causing progressive ruin until the Earth is destroyed: All things are impermanent, all aspects of existence are unstable and non-eternal.
All seedlings, all vegetation, all plants, grasses and trees will dry up and cease to be...There comes another season after a great lapse of time when a second sun will appear.
The East Asian belief in the decline of the Dharma (called mappo in Japanese) was instrumental in the emergence of Pure Land Buddhism.
Within the Theravada tradition, debate over whether Nirvana was still attainable in the present age helped prompt the creation of the Dhammayutt Order in Thailand.
[citation needed] In China, Buddhist eschatology was strengthened by the Daoist influence: the messianic features of Maitreya are widely emphasized.
Thus, one of the Tang dynasty apocrypha predicts his rebirth in the female form, thus creating religious legitimacy for the Wu Zetian Empress's usurpation.
With the recovery of virtue, the human life span will gradually increase again until it reaches 80,000 years, with people attaining sexual maturity at 500.
Due to the historically tenuous relationship between Buddhism and the Confucian State, and to lead the people in accordance with proper Dharma, many eschatological groups appeared during the Sui and Tang dynasty (typically attached to monasteries) and preached that the declining Dharma cycle had begun due to moral laxity or failures of the state.
Among these, many groups which preached a greater devotion to the Dharma teachings as a method of salvation were deemed harmless, and so some of their apocryphal scriptures survived the burning of heretical texts.
Formed by Mao Tzu-Yüan in 1133, the White Lotus sect placed an emphasis on the strict dietary restrictions of its disciples, such that they were not allowed to drink wine and had to eat a vegetarian diet (Overmyer 47).
Despite these dietary restrictions which mirrored those which the monastic order should also be following, the White Lotus were led by married clergy men who “wrote their own scriptures and ritual texts in the vernacular” (Overmyer 47), and the group also allowed female disciples.
Mao’s relationship with the state also changed throughout his life, as White Lotus was attacked by Buddhist monks soon after its founding due to its “rejection of celibacy” and by the government for its “popularity among the people” (Overmyer 47).
During Nichiren's time, Japan had many natural disasters such as floods, storms, earthquakes, famines, landslides, tidal waves, and comets.
According to the Esoteric Buddhist teaching, they use copious sprinkling of holy water from the five vases, or they sit in meditation, resigning to the voidness of all.
There are beggars on every hand, and unburied corpses line the road.Nichiren instead preached that only a return to the teachings of the Lotus Sutra would save the country from destruction (Kodera 44).
His preaching of the Lotus Sutra, as well as his disparagement of Honen Buddhist groups, were met with much resistance, and he was imprisoned or exiled several times during his life.
During one such occasion, he was nearly executed, but was saved by miraculous circumstances in which the sky was “suddenly ablaze with lightning” and the executioner became dizzy and fell (Kodera 47).
Because of the miraculous nature of his survival, Nichiren would come to believe that his body had died, only to begin his second spiritual life (Kodera 47).
He believed, even after both invasions failed, that only a “complete and sudden conversion” would save the country from the destruction created by the monks of other sects and faiths (Kodera 51).
Prince Moonlight, or Yueguang Tongzi, was originally a relatively small Bodhisattva in pre-Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, but due to the combination of Daoist eschatological beliefs, the concept of Mofa (the last period of Dharma), and the notion of a supernatural saviour, Yueguang Tongzi developed into an important figure in Buddhist apocalyptic lore.
After enlightening Srigupta, the Buddha delivers a prophecy concerning Yueguang, stating that he will later be born as a saintly ruler and that he will revive the True Dharma during a time when it is about to fade away (Zürcher (Prince Moonlight) 208).
This interpretation, however, seems to be directly referencing the Sui emperor Wendi, who in the year 601 CE built hundreds of relic-shrines throughout his kingdom (Zürcher (Prince Moonlight) 210).