Māyā

Māyā in the Vedas means a wonderful or uncanny power, the craft by which a god takes on forms. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad calls the Lord the possessor of māyā and nature his māyā. From that root the word came to mean the power of appearance, and in later Advaita it names the principle by which the one Brahman appears as a world of many things.

In Advaita, māyā is neither real nor unreal: not real, because it is overcome by knowledge, and not unreal, because the world it presents is experienced and has practical reality. Later Advaitins call it “indescribable” (anirvacanīya) for this reason. It is often paired with ignorance (avidyā), as the cosmic and the individual sides of a single error.

The word is easily misread as “illusion” in a sense that would make the world simply false. Advaita does not teach that; it teaches that the world is real as long as one stands within it, and that it is not the final truth. Other Vedānta schools reject the doctrine altogether, holding that the world is the real creation or body of the Lord, and some scholars argue that Śaṅkara himself used the word sparingly, the systematic doctrine of māyā belonging to his successors.