A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"MAYA AND ILLUSION. 149niaya, reappearing, but, by this time, a good deal oftransformation,, has been worked upon it,a mass of newmeaning has by this time attached itself to the word.Theories have been propounded and repeated others have:been taken up until at last the idea of maya has become a;fixed quantity. We read in the Svetas vatara UpanishadMayantu prakritim vidyat mayinantu mahesvaram. Knownature to be maya and the mind the ruler of this maya isthe Lord Himself."Coming to our philosophers, we findthat this word maya has been manipulatedin variousfashions, until we come to the great Sankaracharya.Perhaps, the word maya, or the theory was manipulateda little by the Buddhists too, but in the hands ofBuddhists it became very much like what is calledIdealism, and that is the meaning that is now generallygiven to the word maya. When the Hindu says theworld ismaya, at once people get the idea that theworld is an illusion. This interpretation has some basis,as coming through the Buddhistic philosophers, becausethere was one section of philosophers who didnot believein the external world at all. But the maya of the Vedanta,in its last developed form, is neither Idealism nor Realism,neither it is theory. It is a simple statement of factswhat we are, and what we see around us. As I have toldyou before, the minds of the people from whom the Yedascame, were intent upon following principles, discoveringprinciples. As it were, they had no time to work upondetails, or to wait for them ; they wanted to go deep intothe heart of things.Something beyond was calling them,as it were, and they could not wait. As such, we findthat, scattered all through the Upanishads, the detailsof subjects which we now call modern science, areoften very erroneous, but, at the same time, their prin-