Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 65)

July 29, 2001

Parts 1 to 64 were posted earlier. This is part 65. Your comments are welcome... Vivekananda Centre London

Earlier postings can be seen at http://www.vivekananda.btinternet.co.uk/veda.htm

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 65

4. The Highest Point of Vedanta Is Shankara's Idea of Maya

Vedanta and modern science both posit a self-evolving cause. In itself are all the causes. Take, for example, a potter shaping a pot. The potter is the primal cause, the clay the material cause, and the wheel the instrumental cause; but the Atman is all three. Atman is cause and manifestation too. The Vedantist says the universe is not real, it is only apparent. Nature is God seen through nescience. The pantheists say God has become nature or this world; the Advaitists affirm that God is appearing as this world, but It is not this world. (8)

The one sect of Advaitists that you see in modern India is composed of the followers of Shankara. According to Shankara, God is both the material and the efficient cause through maya, but not in reality. God has not become this universe; but the universe is not, and God is. This is one of the highest points to understand of Advaita Vedanta, the idea of maya. (9)

The work of the Upanishads seems to have ended at the point [of merging the two advancing lines of impersonal God and the impersonal Person]; the next was taken up by the philosophers. The framework was given them by the Upanishads, and they had to fill in the details. So many questions would naturally arise. Taking for granted that there is but one impersonal Principle which is manifesting Itself in all these manifold forms, how it is that the One becomes the many? It is another way of putting the same old question, which in its crude form comes into the human heart as the inquiry into the cause of evil, and so forth. Why does evil exist in the world and what is its cause? But the same question has now become refined, abstracted. No more is it asked from the platform of the senses why we are unhappy, but from the platform of philosophy. How is it that this one Principle becomes manifold? And the answer,... the best answer that India produced is the theory of maya which says that It really has not become manifold, that It really has not lost any of its real nature. Manifoldness is only apparent. Humans are only apparently persons, but in reality they are the impersonal Being. God is a person only apparently, but really It is the impersonal Being. (10)

The theory of maya is as old as the Rig Samhita. (11)

The idea of maya which forms, as it were, one of the basic doctrines of the Advaita Vedanta is, in its germs, found even in the Samhitas, and in reality all the ideas which are developed in the Upanishads are found already in the Samhitas in some form or other. Most of you are by this time familiar with the idea of maya and know that it is sometimes erroneously explained as illusion, so that when the universe is said to be maya, that also has to be explained as being illusion. The translation of the word is neither happy nor correct. Maya is not a theory; it is simply a statement of facts about the universe as it exists; and to understand maya we must go back to the Samhitas and begin with the conception in the germ. (12)

The word maya is used, though incorrectly, to denote illusion or delusion, or some such thing. But the theory of maya forms one of the pillars upon which the Vedanta rests; it is, therefore, necessary that it should be properly understood. I ask a little patience of you, for there is a great danger of its being misunderstood. The oldest idea of maya that we find in Vedic literature is the sense of delusion; but then [at that time] the real theory had not been reached. We find such passages as: "Indra, through his maya assumed the form of Guru." [brih. Up., 2.5.19] Here it is true that the word maya means something like magic, and we find various other passages always taking the same meaning. The word maya then dropped out of sight altogether. But in the meantime the idea was developing. Later the question was raised: " Why can't we know this secret of the universe?' And the answer given was very significant: "Because we talk in vain and because we are satisfied with the things of the senses, and because we are running after desires; therefore, we cover the reality with a mist." Here the word maya is not used at all, but we get the idea that the cause of our ignorance is a kind of mist that has come between us and the Truth. Much later on, in one of the latest Upanishads, we find the word maya reappearing, but this time a transformation has taken place in it, and a mass of new meaning has attached itself to the word. Theories had been propounded and repeated, other had been taken up, until at last the idea of maya became fixed. We read in the Swetashwatara Upanisad, "Know nature to be maya, and the ruler of this maya is the Lord himself." [4.10] (13)

The Swetashwatara Upanisad contains the word maya which developed out of prakriti. I hold that Upanisad to be at least older than Buddhism. (14)

Coming to our philosophers, we find that this word maya has been manipulated in various fashions, until we come to the great Shankaracharya. The theory of maya was manipulates a little by the Buddhists, too, but in the hands of the Buddhists it became very much like what we call idealism, and that is the meaning that is now generally given to the word maya. When the Hindu says that the world is maya, at once people get the idea that the world is an illusion. This interpretation has some basis, as coming through the Buddhist philosophers, because there was one section of philosophers who did not believe in an external world at all. But the maya of the Vedanta, in its last developed form, is neither idealism nor realism, nor is it a theory. It is a simple statement of facts - what we are and what we see around us.(15)

Cross reference to:

Rig Veda, 1.164.46

Cha. Up., 3.14.1

6.2.3

Npt. Up., 1.6