Indian Philosophy v1.c7.s2.28

v1.c7.s2.28

There are Advaitins who are dissatisfied with this view, and feel that it is no good covering up our confusion by the use of the word māyā. They attempt to give a more positive account of the relation between the perfect being absolutely devoid of any negativity, the immutable real, felt in the depths of experience and the world of change and becoming. To preserve the perfection of the one reality we are obliged to say that the world of becoming is not due to an addition of any element from outside, since there is nothing outside. It can only be by a diminution. Something negative like Plato’s non-being or Aristotle’s matter is assumed to account for change. Through the exercise of this negative principle, the immutable seems to be spread out in the moving many. Rays stream out of the sun which nevertheless did not contain them. Māyā is the name of the negative principle which lets loose the universal becoming, thereby creating endless agitation and perpetual disquiet. The flux of the universe is brought about by the apparent degradation of the immutable. The real represents all that is positive in becoming. The things of the world ever struggle to recover their reality, to fill up what is lacking in them, to shake off their individuality and separateness, but are prevented from doing so by their inner void, the negative māyā constituted by the interval between what they are and what they ought to be. If we get rid of māyā, suppress the tendency to duality, abolish the interval, fill up the deficit, and allow the disturbance to relax, space, time and change reach back into pure being. As long as the original insufficiency of māyā prevails, things are condemned to be existent in space-time—cause world. Māyā is not a human construction. It is prior to our intellect and independent of it. It is verily the generator of things and intellects, the immense potentiality of the whole world. It is sometimes called the prakṛti. The alternations of generation and decay, the ever-repeated cosmic evolutions, all represent this fundamental deficit in which the world consists. The world of becoming is the interruption of being. Māyā is the reflection of reality. The world-process is not so much a translation of immutable being as its inversion. Yet the world of māyā cannot exist apart from pure being. There can be no movement, if there were not immutability, since movement is only a degradation of the immutable. The truth of the universal mobility is the immobile being.