The World's Plurality Is an Appearance Superimposed by Ignorance

Advaita Vedanta, the nondualist school associated above all with the eighth century teacher Shankara, holds that the plurality a person ordinarily perceives, separate objects, a separate perceiving self standing among them, is not the final truth of what exists but an appearance superimposed on a single undivided reality, Brahman, by avidya, ignorance of that reality's true nature. Shankara's commentaries describe this superimposition, adhyasa, with the analogy of mistaking a coiled rope for a snake in dim light: the snake has no independent existence of its own, yet the mistake is not therefore nothing, since it produces real fear and real consequence until the light improves and the rope is seen for what it is. On this model liberation, moksha, is not the achievement of some new state but the recognition, jnana, that the self, atman, was never in fact distinct from Brahman, a recognition that dissolves the apparent plurality the way accurate sight dissolves the illusion of the snake. The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies situates this doctrine as the load bearing claim of the entire Advaita system, since nearly every other distinctive position the school holds follows from treating the ordinary world of difference as real only in a qualified and ultimately superseded sense.

The maya doctrine became, almost immediately after Shankara's own era, the single most contested claim in later Vedanta, drawing sustained rejection from every major theistic school that followed him. Ramanuja, writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in defense of qualified nondualism, Vishishtadvaita, argued that treating the world of difference as ultimately illusory could not be reconciled with scripture's own repeated description of a real created world sustained by a real personal God, and that a doctrine reducing devotion itself to a stage to be transcended undercut the entire basis of worship. Madhva, founder of Dvaita Vedanta two centuries later, went further, treating Advaita's account of difference not merely as inadequate scripture reading but as a doctrine scripture directly contradicts, and built his own system explicitly to establish the opposite claim, that difference between God, soul and matter is real and eternal rather than a mistake awaiting correction. An Introduction to Hinduism notes that later polemical tradition sometimes labeled Shankara's position Mayavada, illusionism, as a term of reproach rather than simple description, a sign of how thoroughly the doctrine came to define the fault line separating Advaita from the theistic Vedanta schools that grew up in continuing argument against it.