Māyā | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

MĀYĀ. is one of the key terms in Indian religious tradition. Its original meaning may be "creation" or "construction" (from the Sanskrit mā, "measure" or "mete out"), but the term can be used in several connotations, implying a power, a process, and the result of that process.

In the history of Indian thought the term māyā is used with remarkable consistency, to express, define, and explain the enigma of life and the material world. The viewpoint expressed by Śaṅkara, admittedly pivotal, is often stressed too much, at the cost of other opinions conceived by intelligent minds from the time of the Vedas to the modern period. For the Vedic authors, māyā denoted the faculty that transforms an original concept of creative mind into concrete form, a faculty of immense proficiency and shrewdness such as is suggested by the English word craft.

In the Vedas, performances of māyā are mainly ascribed to divine beings, devas ("gods") or asuras ("countergods"). Each god works māyā in his own way and for his own ends. Thus, through māyā Varuṇa metes out the earth and creates order in nature (Ṛgveda 5.85.5 et al.), and Indra employs it to defeat the demon Vrtra or to transform himself into another shape (Ṛgveda 6.47.18: "By his powers of māyā, Indra goes around in many forms," an oft-quoted phrase). The reality of all these mayic creations, however incomprehensible to common man, is never questioned. The Upaniṣads develop a metaphysical notion of māyā as the emanation of the phenomenal world by brahman, the cosmic Self. In post-Vedic Hinduism, the term can be used to convey a metaphysical, epistemological, mythological, or magical sense, depending on the immediate context.

In Indian thought, māyā is the metaphysical principle that must be assumed in order to account for the transformation of the eternal and indivisible into the temporal and differentiated. Beginning with the Upaniṣads (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.1.4–6), empirical reality is most often conceived as a polymorphous modification or transformation of the Absolute, and thus maintains a "derived reality." Mahāyāna Buddhism, however, developed a concept of the world as a "substitution" or "delusion" conjured up by māyā as by an act of illusionism. The world process and our experience of it are devices to hide the inexpressible total void (Nāgārjuna, second century CE?), or cosmic consciousness. Even the Buddha's teaching is said to belong to this sphere of secondary reality. An attitude of nihilism is avoided by the concept of two levels of reality developed by Nāgārjuna: pāramārthika ("ultimate") and vyāvahārika ("practical"). It is therefore not correct to state that for these thinkers the world of māyā is a mere illusion.

In Hindu philosophy (especially the Vedānta school), the concept of māyā follows the Vedic tradition of a mysterious power of self-transformation. The Buddhist doctrine of an ultimate void is emphatically denied: the nonexistent cannot be the source of creation, just as a barren woman can never have a son, says Gauḍapāda (sixth century CE?). After him, Śaṅkara (c. eighth century CE) and later scions of the Advaita ("Nondualist") school also deny ultimate reality to the phenomenal world. But creation is not totally unreal either, since it cannot be separated from the truth that is brahman (what else could be its cause?), and also because it retains a pragmatic validity for the individual as long as the liberating experience of all-oneness has not been reached. "Illusion" thus implies the mysteriously different, not the nihil.

Other Vedānta theorists tend to emphasize the reality of the mayic transformation. According to Rāmānuja (eleventh century CE), the world is a mode of existence of brahman, related to it as the body is to the soul. The Śaiva and Śākta schools of thought also held a realistic view of māyā. In the recent period, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, and others have endeavored to restate the doctrine of māyā in reaction to objections by other philosophical systems without deviating in essentials from the tradition.

Māyā deludes cosmic consciousness into associating itself with individuality, sense perception, and the sensory objects of phenomenal reality. Gauḍapāda interprets this process as a misconception (vikalpa) of the pure and undivided self-consciousness of the ātman, just as in darkness a rope is mistakenly perceived as a snake. To dispel false perception is to attain true insight into the undivided Absolute. Śaṅkara prefers the term avidyā ("nescience") or ajñāna ("ignorance"). This is not just the absence of insight but a positive entity, the cause of superimposition of external experience on the undefiled self-consciousness. Besides, there is a metaphysical avidyā assumed by Śaṅkara as a necessary cause for cosmic evolution in order to vindicate the doctrine of the static unity of brahman. Śaṅkara rejects the equation of ordinary waking experience with dream experience held by the Mahāyāna theorists and Gauḍapāda. In modern Hindu philosophy, the epistemological aspect of māyā is emphasized: māyā does not imply the denial of the reality of the world, but refers only to the relative validity of our experience.

The speculative concept described above has often been clothed in religious myth and popular legend. In the popular mind, the power of māyā often amounted to feats of magic or illusionism (indrajāla). In the epic Mahābhārata (and elsewhere), this power is said to be wielded by God to beguile and delude mankind. "The Lord plays with his subjects as a child with its toys" (Mahābhārata 3.31.19f.). In other contexts, the phenomenal world is likened to a bubble on the water, a drop trickling from a lotus leaf, evanescent autumnal clouds, a colorful patch, or a circle of fire created by a torch. Several legends express the same view in allegorical form. Such religious imagery remains very important in later Hinduism. In religious poetry, māyā is sometimes embodied as a tempting or fear-inspiring woman; she can be the consort of the male supreme being (Śrī for Viṣṇu, Rādhā for Kṛṣṇa, Devī for Śiva) or, in Śāktism, a manifestation of the Cosmic Mother in her own right as Māyādevī or Bhuvaneśvarī (Goddess of the World).

Avidyā; Vedānta.

Discussions of māyā and its place in Indian religious and philosophical thought are dealt with in several books of more general scope. A very scholarly, thoughtful, and dependable survey by a classical Indologist can be found in Jan Gonda's Change and Continuity in Indian Religion (The Hague, 1965), pp. 164–197. Gonda's discussion of māyā in this work is a summary and restatement of two of his earlier studies. Also very readable as an introduction is Paul D. Devanandan's The Concept of Māyā: An Essay in Historical Survey of the Hindu Theory of the World, with Special Reference to the Vedānta (London, 1950; Calcutta, 1954). The author's Christian viewpoint is not stressed. Anil K. Ray Chaudhuri's The Doctrine of Māyā, 2d rev. & enl. ed. (Calcutta, 1950), is a philosophical study with special emphasis on the epistemological doctrine of nescience in the Vedānta. A concise book that focuses mainly on māyā in twentieth-century Hindu philosophy is Ruth Reyna's The Concept of Māyā from the Vedas to the Twentieth Century (London and Bombay, 1962). My own book, Māyā Divine and Human (Delhi, 1978), is a study of Indian and Balinese sources in Sanskrit concentrating on the magical side of the māyā concept. Predating all of these works is Heinrich Zimmer's Maya, der indische Mythos (Stuttgart, 1936), which contains a wealth of legends and personal interpretations.

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