MĀYĀ Skt., lit. “deception, illusion, appearance.”
[H] A universal principle of Vedānta; the foundation of mind and matter. Māyā is the force (shakti) of brahman and hence is eternally, inseparably united with brahman, just as heat is united with fire. Māyā and Brahman together are named – Īshvara, the personal God who creates, maintains, and dissolves the universe. As ignorance or cosmic illusion, māyā draws a veil over brahman and also veils our vision, so that we see only the diversity of the universe rather than the one reality. Māyā has two aspects: avidyā (ignorance) and vidyā (knowledge). Avidyā leads man away from God and toward worldliness and imprisonment by materiality, which in turn leads to passion and greed. Vidyā leads to God-realization and finds expression in spiritual virtues. Both aspects are active in the realm of time, place, and causality, and hence are relative. Human beings transcend avidyā and vidya by realizing brahman, the Absolute.
[B] [Z] The continually changing, impermanent phenomenal world of appearances and forms, of illusion or deception, which an unenlightened mind takes as the only reality. The concept of māyā is used in opposition to that of the immutable, essential absolute, which is symbolized by the dharmakāya (trikāya). The recognition of all dharmas as māyā is equivalent to the experience of “awakening” (enlightenment, bodhi) and the realization of nirvāna. According to the highest teachings of Buddhism, as they are formulated, for example, in Zen, it is not actually an illusion or deception to regard the phenomenal world as real; the deception consists rather in taking the phenomenal world to be the immutable and only reality and thus to misplace the view of what is essential. Fundamentally, the relative and the absolute are one and identical, and ma.ya (Jap., mayoi, delusion) and bodhi (enlightenment) are one.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen. Shambhala Publications, Inc.
External links: Maya