Lila — The Divine Play
The Teaching
"The Indian imagery makes the world-drama a comedy, a sport or lila, in which all endings are the implicit promise of beginnings. 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." — after Alan Watts
Commentary
Two words carry the whole vision. Maya is usually translated as illusion, which misleads. Maya does not mean the world is unreal; it means the world is an appearance mistaken for the entirety of what is, the drama taken as life and death by an actor who has forgotten it is a drama. The forgetting is maya.
Lila is the divine play: the entire production, creation and destruction alike, understood as the self at play, hiding from itself for the pleasure of finding itself again. Put the two together and the cosmic giggle becomes legible. It is the sound a person makes at the instant the maya is seen as lila, when the drama taken as deadly serious is recognized as a play, and one recognizes being simultaneously the actor lost in the part and the one who wrote it and is enjoying the show.
The Tao Te Ching keeps the same key: if it were not laughed at, it would not be sufficient to be the Tao. A truth that could not be laughed at would be too small to be the truth.