About Maitreya

Maitreya (Koji Takeuchi) was born and brought up in Handa, Japan, near Nagoya. During the difficult teens he began a desperate search for truth, turning to meditation with the hope of personal contact with the truth.

And so it was that he found himself on a week's meditation course for lay people at a monastery one summer where he had the experience 'Enlightenment' through his total sacrifice and dedication that was to firmly lay down the foundations for his life as a meditation teacher.

In the moment of 'Enlightenment', he saw the absolute perfection and beauty intrinsic in all things and all beings, the essence of Life. The clarity and joy of that experience and its profundity gave rise to the strong wish to share this with everyone by helping them to experience it too by means of simple meditation.

Maitreya, for the purpose of becoming a meditation master, went on to university to complete an MA degree in Buddhist Theology and lived the life of a Zen monk for a time. But he felt the monastic life was too harsh, rigid and out of date.

Maitreya left Japan to spend a year in Thailand, then went traveling in India and Nepal where he began teaching meditation for a few years.Through the invitation of a friend he came to England. He stayed in various centres and universities around the country, Reading University, Cambridge University and Lancaster University, etc., teaching and lecturing.

It was whilst staying in Teversal in Nottingham he came across a property for sale in North Clifton which became a base from which to teach meditation. Pure Land was born in 1973.