Advaita Vedanta's doctrine of maya is easy to caricature as simple denial that the world exists, but its classical formulation is more careful than that: the world is described as anirvacaniya, indescribable as either simply real or simply unreal, because it functions as real within ordinary experience, water genuinely quenches thirst and fire genuinely burns, while failing to be real in the ultimate sense reserved for Brahman alone, since the world's apparent separateness and multiplicity dissolve once the underlying non-dual reality is directly realized, much as a rope mistaken for a snake in dim light is a real perceptual event but not a real snake. Shankara, the tradition's most influential systematizer, argued that avidya, ignorance, is what generates this superimposition, and that liberation consists precisely in seeing through it rather than in changing anything about the world itself.
F.H. Bradley reached a comparably deflationary verdict about ordinary reality from a very different starting point, arguing in Appearance and Reality that relations, space, time, and causation, the basic categories through which the everyday world is organized, are internally contradictory when examined closely, and must therefore belong only to appearance, with a single, harmonious Absolute standing behind them as the only fully coherent reality. Both arguments share a structure that critics find question-begging: each starts by defining full reality so strictly, as strictly self-identical and free of internal contradiction, that the ordinary world can only ever fail to qualify.