Maya

To translate maya as illusion and stop there is to hand the doctrine two claims it does not make: that the world is a hallucination, and that it is worthless. Neither follows.

Advaita is careful that maya occupies a middle ground it calls anirvachaniya, indescribable as either real or unreal. The world is not unreal, because it is experienced, coherent and law-governed; it is not finally real, because it has no standing independent of the Brahman that appears as it. The two stock images hold the line precisely:

• The rope and the snake: a traveller recoils from a snake that is really a rope. The fear is real, the snake is not simply invented, and yet what is there is only the rope. Seeing the rope ends the snake without anything being destroyed.
• The shell and the silver: a gleam of silver on the beach turns out to be a shell. Something was genuinely seen; it was not what it was taken for.

The rival Vedanta schools reject the whole account. For Ramanuja the world is fully real as the body of God, and he devotes a famous sevenfold refutation to maya. The atlas records the doctrine as Advaita's, contested from within Hinduism, and not as the settled Hindu view of the world.

Maya is often compared loosely with Western traditions that also treat ordinary experienced reality as somehow deficient, and two comparisons, Plato's cave and Gnostic cosmology, are worth examining for how closely, and how imperfectly, they match.

Plato's allegory of the cave, in the Republic, describes prisoners who mistake shadows on a wall for reality, having never seen the objects casting them; escape represents philosophical education leading to knowledge of the Forms, reality's true basis, of which sensible things are imperfect copies. The resemblance to maya is real: both hold ordinary experience presents something derivative and lower than what stands behind it. But Plato's Forms are a plurality of distinct, independently real objects, where Advaita's Brahman is a single, undifferentiated reality with no internal multiplicity, and the cave-dweller's shadows are simply false copies, where maya's rope and snake are cases of misidentifying something genuinely there, the rope really exists, only the snake does not.

Gnostic cosmology goes further: the material world is typically held to be the flawed or malevolent creation of an inferior being, the demiurge, rather than an appearance of the true, transcendent God, making matter something to be escaped as the product of a cosmic error. Advaita rejects this stronger claim: maya is Brahman's own power of appearance, not the botched work of a lesser creator, and the world maya produces, while not the final truth, is never described as evil or the deliberate work of a flawed demiurge, which is why comparative theologians treat the resemblance between maya and Gnostic deficiency as weaker than the more genuine, if imperfect, parallel with Plato's cave.