In the Vedas māyā means a god’s magical power to create forms. In Ādi Śaṅkara‘s Advaita it becomes the inexplicable power through which Brahman appears as the manifold world — not simply unreal (like a hare’s horn), not ultimately real (like Brahman), but anirvacanīya, indescribable.
The classic image: a rope seen as a snake at dusk. Fear is real; the snake is not; the rope was there all along. Rāmānuja rejected the whole doctrine. Arthur Schopenhauer identified it with Kant’s world of appearances — “the veil of Māyā”.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalBrahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā
Origin. Traditional summary of Advaita, attributed to Śaṅkara. — Ādi Śaṅkara
⚠ “Mithyā” does not mean non-existent like a hare’s horn, but dependent and ultimately unreal — like the snake seen in a rope.
For Advaita in one line.
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The founder of Vaiśeṣika and traditional author of the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras — the sage remembered as India’s first atomist, who taught that everything perceptible is built from eternal, indivisible particles.
Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination)
The Buddha’s central insight — “when this exists, that comes to be; when this ceases, that ceases.” Nothing exists independently; everything arises from conditions. Applied to suffering, it becomes the twelve-linked chain from ignorance to death.
Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
Emptiness — the Mahāyāna teaching that all things lack intrinsic, independent existence (svabhāva), because they arise in dependence on causes, parts and concepts. Not nothingness, but the openness that makes change and freedom possible.
The Thing-in-Itself
Reality as it is independently of how it appears to us — for Kant, thinkable but never knowable.
Gārgī Vācaknavī
The woman philosopher who challenged Yājñavalkya at King Janaka’s court with questions about what the universe is “woven on” — pressing him until he warned that her head would fall off, then returning with two questions “like arrows”. One of the earliest named women philosophers in history.
Anekāntavāda
The Jain doctrine that reality is many-sided — that every thing has infinite aspects and every statement captures only one, so that truth requires holding many viewpoints together. Expressed in the parable of the blind men and the elephant and formalised in the sevenfold logic of syādvāda.