In Hinduism, the Sanskrit word maya has two main meanings: it refers to both the awe-inspiring creative power of the gods and the illusory nature of the everyday world. Why is the same word used for both of those seemingly very different things?
Throughout Hinduism, the gods and goddesses are often portrayed as mayins: “sorcerers” or “wizards” with tremendous magical powers.[1] Through their magic, they conjure the world. For example, Shiva deliriously dances the world into being, and Vishnu, asleep on the back of a giant snake, crafts the world in his dreams.[2] As the similar sounds and spellings of the two words maya and mayin imply, maya refers to the powers and works of the mayins, and thus means something like “sorcery” or “wizardry.”[3]
Since the world is created by such whimsical processes, it has something phantasmagoric and insubstantial about it, like a magic trick or a dream image. It’s not fully real like the gods themselves are. Ultimately, it’s a grand illusion.[4]
Our ordinary lives are lived entirely within the magical illusion of maya. While under its spell, we mistakenly think that this world of finite, separate, suffering beings is fully real. So each of us identifies ourselves with one such being – one particular body, mind, and ego. Since we see ourselves as painfully limited and lacking, we crave for various other limited things in a hopeless attempt to become whole while still remaining a separate, finite being.[5] Of course, we’re not consciously aware of doing this any more than a fish is consciously aware of being in water, which just makes the spell that much more powerful.
What we truly need, according to Hinduism, is to break the spell of maya and realize through firsthand experience that everything is one and everything is divine. Hinduism calls this unparalleled experience moksha, “liberation,” the Hindu term for spiritual enlightenment.[6]
Maya in the Upanishads
Let’s now add more depth and detail to that brief sketch of maya in Hinduism.
The most sacred books in Hinduism are the Vedas, which contain numerous types of texts on a great many different subjects. One of the main types of texts in the Vedas is a group of mystical poems called the “Upanishads.” The Upanishads’ central aim is to disclose the underlying nature and meaning of everything else in the Vedas, and thus also the underlying nature and meaning of life and the world as a whole.[7] The Upanishads are therefore the places where the innermost beliefs of Hinduism are expressed, so they’re the most important texts to turn to in order to find out what Hinduism’s definitive teachings on maya are.
The central message of the Upanishads can be summarized in the following way: absolute reality is Brahman, the divine. Brahman appears to its human worshipers in countless different forms, which are the many gods and goddesses of Hinduism. Thus, these numerous deities are really only one at bottom – just different “faces” of the same thing. Likewise, while each being has an individual soul, all of these different souls are ultimately one: the Atman, the innermost “Self” of everything. Brahman and the Atman are one and the same, and that one thing is all that truly exists. Moksha is the realization of that oneness of your true Self and the divine.[8]
Maya is what stands between us and that realization. As the Shvetashvatara Upanishad puts it, maya is the “net of appearance” in which we’re caught:
Brahman, attributeless Reality,
Becomes the Lord of Love who casts his net
Of appearance over the cosmos and rules
It from within through his divine power.
He was before creation; he will be
After dissolution. He alone is.[9]
Paradoxically, although this net of maya hides the divine from our view, it consists of nothing other than the divine, since “He alone is.” Such is the power of the wizardry of the “supreme magician:”
The Lord, who is the supreme magician,
Brings forth out of himself all the scriptures,
Oblations, sacrifices, spiritual disciplines,
Past and present, and the whole universe.
Invisible through the magic of maya,
He remains hidden in the hearts of all.[10]
While we’re in that state of being unable to perceive the true reality beneath maya, we’re deluded into liking certain things that come our way and disliking others, because we imagine that they’re truly different things rather than just different “names” and “forms” of the same underlying divine oneness:
From his divine power comes forth all this
Magical show of name and form, of you
And me, which casts the spell of pain and pleasure.
Only when we pierce through this magic veil
Do we see the One who appears as many.[11]
The Taittiriya Upanishad concurs: Brahman is “the pure One masquerading as many.”[12] Everything is unreal inasmuch as it appears to be something other than the divine, but since everything in maya is surreptitiously a manifestation or reflection of Brahman, there is absolute reality behind the misleading everyday appearances of things:
He who has no form assumed many forms;
He who is infinite appeared finite;
He who is everywhere assumed a place;
He who is all wisdom caused ignorance;
He who is real caused unreality.
It is he who has become everything.
It is he who gives reality to all.[13]
According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, that absolute reality behind maya is “pure awareness.” The specific contents of awareness – the things we perceive and think and feel on an everyday basis – are part of maya, but awareness itself remains constant and unchanging throughout all of that: “The Self, pure awareness, shines as the light within the heart, surrounded by the senses. Only seeming to think, seeming to move, the Self neither sleeps nor wakes nor dreams.”[14]
Thus the human narrator of the Isha Upanishad addresses the sun, which stands in for any and all specific contents of awareness,
The face of truth is hidden by your orb
Of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb
So that I, who adore the true, may see
The glory of truth…
So that I may see your blessed Self.
Even that very Self am I![15]
Maya in Hindu Philosophy
Throughout the history of Hinduism, philosophically-minded Hindus have tried to understand their religion in a systematic and rational way. Many of them have naturally turned to the Upanishads as the foundation of all Hindu thought, and have presented their philosophies as commentaries on, and interpretations of, the Upanishads. Unlike the Upanishads themselves, which are believed to be divinely revealed, Hinduism treats these philosophies as things that humans have worked out for themselves, and which are therefore liable to contain all kinds of mistakes.[16]
Nevertheless, two of these philosophies in particular have greatly influenced the views of thinking Hindus, past and present, on the nature of maya and related questions. Let’s therefore briefly examine what these two philosophies have to say about maya so as to get a fuller picture of the concept.
The first of these two philosophies is that of Shankara, who lived sometime in the eighth or ninth century AD.[17] Shankara’s philosophy is called “Advaita Vedanta.” The word Vedanta means that the philosophy is a commentary on the Upanishads,[18] and the word advaita means “monistic” or “non-dualistic.”[19] In less technical terms, that means that Advaita Vedanta is an interpretation of the Upanishads that consistently stresses the oneness of the divine and of all things in the divine.
Shankara emphasizes the deceptive nature of maya, which he treats as a magic trick that Brahman, the great illusionist, plays on itself to make it think that it’s a multitude of separate, finite beings who are subject to the tyranny of pleasure and pain. Since Brahman is all that really exists, even the spell of maya is part of Brahman.[20] Shankara equates maya with “ignorance” (avidya or ajnana)[21] and “superimposition” (adhyasa).[22]
All of our sensory observations, thoughts, and feelings just beg the question: how do we know that any of this is real? We can’t appeal to sensory observations, thoughts, or feelings to answer this question, because that would be circular logic. However, the one thing that’s impossible to doubt is the existence of consciousness itself, because consciousness is the indisputable basis for all of our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, whatever they may be. The existence of the Atman, the Self, is self-evident; everything else is highly suspect.[23]
The simile that Shankara uses to illustrate his view of maya has become famous in Hinduism: the spell of maya is like when we see something on the ground that we initially think is a snake, but upon closer inspection turns out to be a rope. As long as the illusion of the snake persists, we take it for granted that what we’re seeing is a snake, and we have a corresponding emotional reaction, perhaps fear or fascination. But then we take a closer look, the illusion dissipates, and we feel silly for having made that perceptual error and taken it so seriously. There was only one thing there all along – not a snake and a rope, but just a rope temporarily passing for a snake. Moksha, enlightenment, is seeing the rope for what it is, and thus replacing ignorance with true understanding (vidya or jnana).[24]
Now let’s see what the second particularly influential Hindu philosophy has to say about maya. This philosophy is the creation of Ramanuja, who lived in the eleventh or twelfth century AD,[25] and it’s called “Vishishtadvaita Vedanta.” The word vishishtadvaita is a combination of two words: vishishta and advaita. We’ve already seen that advaita is the name of Shankara’s philosophy and means “monistic” or “non-dualistic.” Vishishta means “qualified,” so vishishtadvaita means “qualified monistic” or “qualified non-dualistic.” As that name implies, Ramanuja agrees with Shankara that all things are ultimately one in the divine, but he also holds that, within that overarching oneness, there are real and important distinctions to be made between different types of things.[26]
Ramanjua’s view of maya is much easier to explain than Shankara’s, because it aligns much more closely with what most people would consider to be a “common sense” view of things.
Like Shankara and the Upanishads, Ramanuja holds that maya is the creative power of the gods and the world they’ve created with that power. However, he also holds that the world the gods have created is real rather than illusory. It’s the body of the gods. So, in keeping with Ramanuja’s perspective of “qualified monism,” he asserts that although everything is fundamentally one with Brahman, the differences between things that we perceive in our everyday lives are real in their own right, too. Different things are different parts of Brahman, so our everyday perception of multiplicity in the world is valid for what it is – it’s just that it’s incomplete by itself.[27][28]
What are we to do with these two philosophies of maya? In my own view, Shankara’s perspective is the fuller of the two, but there’s a time and a place for Ramanuja’s perspective, too.
Since the Upanishads clearly teach that the everyday world is less than fully real, Shankara’s perspective on maya is evidently closer to the position of the Upanishads themselves than Ramanuja’s viewpoint is. In an important sense, Shankara simply (but ingeniously) systematizes what the Upanishads already say.
Furthermore, Shankara’s philosophy is also just truer-to-life: not to everyday life, of course, but to the mystical experience of the oneness of all things. Shankara seems to present the experience of enlightenment on something very much like its own terms, whereas Ramanuja “qualifies” that experience by deferring to our ordinary perceptions of things.
My question for Ramanuja and his followers would be: if the everyday world is more or less unproblematically real in its own right, why is a radical revolution (moksha) in our awareness necessary for us to realize that we’re one with the divine? If the true Self is not the body, mind, and ego that we mistakenly identify with on an everyday basis, then isn’t that identification, well, an illusion maintained by our ignorance (avidya or ajnana)? And if that is the case, then doesn’t the rest of Shankara’s view of maya follow ineluctably from that?
However, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the value Ramanuja’s philosophy has in its own right. Shankara’s philosophy presents the world as it looks from certain mystical heights that most people have never experienced before, which carries the downside of being that much less relatable to the average person. Most people’s day-to-day spirituality takes the form of worshiping the divine as something outside of themselves, which treats the world and the divine as if both were real, just as Ramanuja says they are. Ramanuja meets the average person where he or she is and points him or her in the direction of moksha – of becoming aware that, despite the differences between different things, there’s a deeper oneness that underlies all of that. Whereas Shankara seems to want people to make a radical and jarring leap toward moksha, Ramanuja provides people with a gentler and more gradual “ladder” to the same destination.
The aspects of Ramanuja’s philosophy that seem like weaknesses from a perspective like Shankara’s turn out to be strengths in certain contexts. And Shankara would be the first to point out that unlike the absolute reality of Brahman, everything in maya is ultimately relative and thus a matter of context. In an important sense, therefore, these two versions of monism are complementary rather than just contradictory.
References:
[1] Kinsley, David R. 1975. The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krishna, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology. University of California Press. p. 133-134.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Bartley, Christopher. 2015. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources. Bloomsbury. p. 192.
[4] Kinsley, David R. 1975. The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krishna, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology. University of California Press. p. 133-134.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. p. 134.
[7] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 156-157.
[8] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 38-39.
[9] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 165.
[10] Ibid. p. 170.
[11] Ibid. p. 169-170.
[12] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Taittiriya Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 247.
[13] Ibid. p. 254.
[14] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 109.
[15] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Isha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 59.
[16] Sastry, Trilochan. 2022. The Essentials of Hinduism: An Introduction to All the Sacred Texts. Penguin/Viking Press. p. 78.
[17] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 142.
[18] Ibid. p. 141-142.
[19] Bartley, Christopher. 2015. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources. Bloomsbury. p. 182.
[20] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 142-144.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 357.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 142-144.
[25] Ibid. p. 144.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid. p. 144-145.
[28] Chatterjee, Satischandra, and Dhirendramohan Datta. 1960. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy. University of Calcutta Press. p. 414.