Why "Illusion" Is the Wrong Word

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.