A section from the journey

Maya: the Veil and the Wondrous Power

Here we meet a word that travels a long road: maya. In the oldest hymns it meant a god's wondrous, creative power. In one Upanishad it becomes the way nature itself is spread out by the one hidden reality, like a magician's display. It is a veil that both hides and shows. But take care: the famous idea that "the whole world is an illusion" comes much later. Here, maya is only a seed.

We come now to a famous word. You may have heard it before, and you may think you know what it means. Let us set that aside and meet it fresh, the way the sages first used it. The word is .

Long ago, in the oldest hymns, maya did not mean "illusion" at all. This surprises many people, so hold it gently. Back then, maya meant wondrous power. It was the creative art by which a great god, such as Varuna whom you met in the Vedic age, could shape forms and work marvels. It was a kind of magic, yes, but a real and shining one. A power to make, not a trick to fool.

Then, in one of the Upanishads, the word takes a deeper turn. This Upanishad is called the Shvetashvatara. In it, the whole spread-out world of nature is spoken of as maya. And the one reality behind the world is called the — the wielder of that wondrous power.

Picture a magician and the show the magician casts upon the air. The show is dazzling and full of forms. Behind it stands the one who casts it. The forms are the maya. The caster is the mayin. So the one reality does not sit far away and empty. It spreads itself out as this whole bright world.

So maya here is a veil, but a strange and double one. With one hand it hides. It dresses the single reality in a thousand forms, until we forget there is one thing beneath them all. With the other hand it shows. For it is only through those very forms that the hidden reality comes near enough for us to glimpse. The veil both conceals and reveals.

Now your guide must stop and say something with great care, because this is where many go astray. You may have heard that Hinduism teaches "the whole world is an illusion" — a mere dream, unreal, something to wake up from. That is a powerful teaching. But it is not what these early sages are saying here.

That grander idea — maya as the world's unreality — is shaped much later in our story, in the age of the great philosophers, above all by two teachers named Gaudapada and Shankara, more than a thousand years after these Upanishads. It is a real and deep teaching. But it belongs to its own time, and we will meet it there. To put it in the mouths of these forest sages would be to rush ahead and to misread them.

So here, at its source, we plant maya as a seed and no more. Wondrous power. The play of the one hidden reality behind the many forms we see. A veil that hides and shows at once. Remember the word. You met it here first, gentle and small. In a later age it will grow into one of the boldest ideas in all the world.

Think of a time when you were so caught up in the many small things of a day that you forgot the one large thing that mattered. The sages would say the veil had drawn across. Where in your life does the rush of forms hide the quiet ground beneath them?