And why some crack-pot web sites believe he is the anti-christ?
Here in the UK, a man called Benjamin Creme regularly gives free public lectures about The Maitreya, essentially proposing that (a) Maitreya is some sort of world teacher and the next messiah figure, (b) he has already made at least one ‘miraculous’ appearance in Nairobi, and © he will come out of the shadows and start his public mission when he judges the time is right.
Creme has been promoting this message for at least 20 years. I have not attended any of his lectures.
There is no reason to attach any credence to Creme’s message or these claims about a new messiah figure. There is no independently corroborated evidence which substantiates the claims. The claims are neither testable nor falsiable. The most important claim concerns something which it is alleged will occur at an unspecified point in the future (that the Maitreya is going to emerge when the time is right). A claim that such-and-such an event will occur at an unspecified time in the future cannot be assessed or evaluated, cannot be falsified, and can never be shown to be incorrect.
Until such time as substantiating evidence is produced, or events come to pass which corroborate these claims, there is no reason to regard these claims as any different from the claim that at some (unspecified) point in the future a giant frog will appear, cough up Elvis Presley and a simple home cure for cancer, do a tap-dance and then hop on a magic flying camel and go to Venus.
Stepping back a . . . step, in Buddhism regular old Maitrya is the Buddha of the Future, a yet-unborn boddhisattva who currently resides in a particular heaven. I think Kukai (famous monk who started Shingon sect in Japan in 9th c or so) claimed to be Maitreya. Just for a bit of background for the current wackery.
It goes like this:
Maitreya= Buddhist Godess of mercy. In Chinese, she is called Kwan-Yin, which, in Japanese is best written as “Kan Non,” which is where Canon photocopiers take their name. As everyone knows, photocopiers are the product of the Anti-Christ due to their tendency to jam at exactly the moment you need them most.
QED.