Māyā
How should the world's reality be understood?
Māyā is the term through which the commentators address how the world's reality should be understood.
Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita both use the term māyā, but give it very different meanings, as the two accounts below show. No passage from Madhva is included under this concept.
How each commentator reads it
The world's apparent difference from Brahman, understood as illusion or superimposition in a technical sense that requires careful qualification: not naive non-existence, but a status 'sublated' upon true knowledge, exactly as the dream-world is sublated by the waking state. Extends to a wider claim that the entire empirical world, not only dreams, is mere illusion relative to Brahman.
Read Śaṅkara’s interpretation →Wonderful, marvelous things or creative acts, specifically works brought about directly and effortlessly by the Supreme Person's will, explicitly not illusion or unreality. Maya here names a capacity (the power to instantly realize any wish), evidenced paradigmatically by the created content of dreams, which are real objects with real, if temporary, existence, produced by the Lord for the dreaming soul to experience.
Read Rāmānuja’s interpretation →No passage from Madhva is included under this concept.