The set mistaken for the play

Maya is not that the world is unreal, but that the appearance is taken for the whole truth: the set mistaken for the play, the mask mistaken for the face behind it.

Maya is usually translated as illusion, and the translation has done centuries of damage, because it makes the tradition sound like it thinks your kitchen is not there. It thinks your kitchen is there. What it thinks is that the kitchen, the argument you had in it, the person you were during the argument, are a stage set, and that you have been reading the set as if it were the whole production.

The other word is lila, play. Not play as in trivial; play as in the thing actors do, wholeheartedly, knowing it is a play. Notice how the second course’s mask returns here at the scale of the world. The veil is not a lie laid over reality. It is reality, taken too literally. Read this on a day when something has gone badly and see whether set, not play changes the size of it.