section 16. MaYa.--The word maya, magic illusion, is commonly used in the later Vedanta to denote the phantom character of the phenomenal world; and in this sense it does not appear in the Upanishads until the S'vetas'vatara (IV. 10). It is not found in the Brahma-sutra; and hence the question has often been raised whether the idea denoted by it was actually present in the minds of the authors of the older Upanishads.

That phenomena, even to the first principles under which they are cognised (space, time, and causality), are unreal relatively to Absolute Being, is a cardinal doctrine not only of the Upanishads but of all metaphysics. Even the Vedic poets assert a real being of primal unity concealed behind the manifold of experience; and on this is founded the Upanishadic principle that the universe exists only in and by virtue of a World-Idea essentially identical with the individual consciousness. This, however, is still far from the maya-theory of the later Vedanta. The authors of the older Upanishads were still much influenced by the realism of the Vedas, and it is therefore doubtful whether they could have agreed with the Vedantists who treat the world of experience as absolutely unreal, a mere phantom

conjured up by the Self for its own delusion. As typical of the Upanishadic attitude we may regard the theory of the Five Atmas ( section 12) and the long passage of the Brihad-aranyaka (III. vii. 3 f.) where the Self is described in detail as the antaryami, or "inward controller," functioning as soul within matter as its body. Their view was in the main somewhat as follows. Phenomena are evolved from the Self, and hold their existence as intelligibilia in fee from the Self; with the knowledge of the Self they become known as phases of it; hence they are, to this extent, and no further, really existent (satya, B.A. I. vi. 3), provisionally true, although it is only ignorance of the Self that regards them as really independent of the Self and manifold. The Upanishads on the whole conceive the empiric soul's ignorance as a negative force, an absence of light; with S'ankara and the later Vedanta it is positive, a false light, a constructive illusion. Brahma as cause of phenomena is in the Upanishads a real material, in S'ankara's school an unreal material.

The difficulties besetting S'ankara when he endeavours to bring logical order into the vague idealism of the Upanishads are very serious. On the one hand he maintains that the whole phenomenal world is unreal (avastu). As a magician (mayavi) causes a phantom or wraith to issue from his person which has no real existence and by which the magician himself is entirely unaffected,