End of times

I used the phrase, "End of times," casually, but been looking into it.

Supposedly Buddhism doesn't really use the phrase, but in the year 4300 Maitreya might be returning (Wikipedia), (Source) and (Digha Nikaya, 26).

The text then foretells the birth of Maitreya Buddha in the city of Ketumatī, in present-day Benares perhaps. Ketumati is associated with the city of Banaras in Uttar Pradesh, India. Looking, there are 20 temples in Benares on the Ganges River, often with national names like Tibet, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Bengal. Many are not nationally named, the 2 inside the city aren't, and one has a famous stupa. Varanasi is one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. India's oldest Sanskrit college, the Benares Sanskrit College, was founded during East India Company rule in 1791.

Dhamek Stupa is supposedly where the Buddha gave his first sermon and teachings to the 5 disciples Kaundinya, Assaji, Bhaddiya, Vappa and Mahanama. 

While visiting Sarnath in 640 CE, Xuanzang recorded that the colony had over 1,500 priests and the main stupa was nearly 300 feet (91 m) high (Wikipedia).

Wikipedia lists the mean high temperature over 100 for April, May and June in Benares. Looks like the coldest month January is the time to visit Varanasi or Benares, goes by 2 names.

"Note that no description of Maitreya occurs in any other sutta in the canon, casting doubt as to the authenticity of the scripture. In addition, sermons of the Buddha normally are in response to a question, or in a specific context, but this sutta has a beginning and an ending, and its content is quite different from the others. This has led some to conclude that the whole sutta is apocryphal, or tampered with." (Wikipedia)

The sutta that predicts 7 suns and holocaust: Aňguttara-Nikăya, VII 6.2 isn't easy to find, it's not included on online Pali Canon, probably rightly so. 

I looked in on the conditions of end of times in the Bible, and it seems like with war, earthquakes, duplicitous leaders, breakdown of order that we are indeed in the end of times. The article says end of times started around WW1. A Pew Research Center study found in 2022 that over 60 percent of evangelical Christians in the US believe we are living in the end times.

I haven't seen what the end of times means in Christianity, seems just like it's a motivation to get right with God. Difficult times call for increased spiritual effort perhaps. If you can really believe that belief and surrender to God makes you happy, then it's a self fulfilling prophecy, and if you can achieve that, more power to you. 

This subject is called Eschatology. The prediction of the end of the world. I feel like things are pretty chaotic with hurricanes, earthquakes, eclipses, social chaos and disorder, but I don't imagine my subjective feeling of the end of the world is the literal end of the world. It should more accurately be described as feeling uncertain and unsettled in chaos and change.