THE Doctrine of Maya - HolyBooks.com

"""PREFACEviiceptionis to be traced in the earlier literature beforethe time of Sankara (who flourished about a thousand years before his spiritual disciple, Schopenhauer). Hence I have confined my inquiry to theVedic literature, especially the Upanisads, andhave carried my investigation down to Sankara.My conclusions are (i)that the conception of Mayais as old as some of the later books of the Rgvedawhere its forms are clearly noticeable, and that itgradually developed through the speculation of theUpanisads, and passing through the hands ofGaudapada and Sankara was crystallized into atechnical form, elaborated more and more as timewent on ; (2)ofillusionthat the wordMaya,"in the senseof course, occurs later for the firsttime in the Svetasvatara Upanisad (iv. 10) ; and(3) that most of the critics of Maya have startedwith gratuitously assuming Maya to be a concretereality, standing face to face with the Absolute asit were, a tertium quid between the Absolute andthe Universe and this has made their whole criticism futile and irrelevant. Some again have criticised it while perfectly ignoring one of its chiefprinciples, which, expressed in modern Kantianphrase, would run "The transcendental: idealityof the world does not depriveit of its empiricalreality."as it isChapter I is more or less introductory,intended to help indirectly towards a thoroughgrasp of the idea of Maya. The philology of the