The same word maya carries two entirely separate senses across Indian religious literature, and Jain usage is careful to keep them apart even though nothing in the spelling marks the difference: the pan Indic metaphysical sense, cosmic illusion, the veil that makes a changing, dependent world appear solid and self existent, is a Vedantic and broadly Hindu concern that Jain philosophy does not share in the same form, while the kashaya sense used here names something much narrower, deceit or crookedness in a person's dealings, presenting oneself or one's intentions as other than they actually are. As one of the four kashayas alongside krodha, mana and lobha, maya is what causes karmic matter to bind to the soul specifically through the mechanism of duplicity: the Tattvartha Sutra treats a straightforward wrong action as generating one kind of karmic consequence, but a deceitful one, wrapped in false appearance, as compounding that consequence because the deceit itself is a further act requiring its own unwinding.
Padmanabh Jaini's study of the tradition notes that maya is regarded as especially corrosive to monastic community life specifically, since the Jain ascetic path depends heavily on mutual confession, pratikramana, and a monk or nun practising maya toward their own teacher or fellow renunciants undermines the confession mechanism the whole disciplinary system relies on to function.