Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/486

 47° The Sailkara School of Vedanta [CH. the word maya occurs only once in the Brhadarar:tyaka and once only in the Prasna. In early Pali Buddhist writings it occurs only in the sense of deception or deceitful conduct. Buddhaghoa uses it in the sense of magical power. In Nagarjuna and the Lan- kava tara it has acquired the sense of illusion. In Sailkara the word maya is used in the sense of illusion, both as a principle of creation as a sakti (power) or accessory cause, and as the phenomenal creation itself, as the illusion of world-appearance. I t may also be mentioned here that Gauc;lapada the teacher of Satikara's teacher Govinda worked out a system with the help of the maya doctrine. The U paniads are permeated with the spirit of an earnest enquiry after absolute truth. They do not pay any attention towards explaining the world-appearance or enquiring into its relations with absolute truth. Gauc;lapada asserts clearly and probably for the first time among Hindu thinkers, that the world does not exist in reality, that it is maya, and not reality. When the highest truth is realized maya is not removed, for it is not a thing, but the whole world-illusion is dissolved into its own airy nothing never to recur again. I twas Gauc;lapada who compared the world-appearance with dream appearances, and held that ob- jects seen in the waking world are unreal, because they are capable of being seen like objects seen in a dream, which are false and unreal. The atman says Gauc;lapada is at once the cognizer and the cognized, the world subsists in the atman through maya. As atman alone is real and all duality an illusion, it necessarily follows that all experience is also illusory. Sailkara expounded this doctrine in his elaborate commentaries on the U paniads and the Brahma-sutra, but he seems to me to have done little more than making explicit the doctrine of maya. Some of his followers however examined and thought over the concept of maya and brought out in bold relief its character as the indefin- able thereby substantially contributing to the development of the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta theory of Perception and Inference l. Pramarya is the means that leads to right knowledge. If memory is intended to be excluded from the definition then 1 Dharmarajarlhvarindra and his son Ramakgil)a worked out a complete scheme of the theory of Vedantic perception and inference. This is in complete agreement with the general Vedanta metaphysics. The early Vedantists were more interested in