we
clearly must not lose sight of, when attempting to determine what the
Upanishads themselves are teaching concerning the character of the
world.

In enquiring whether the Upanishads maintain the Maya doctrine or not,
we must proceed with the same caution as regards other parts of the
system, i.e. we must refrain from using unhesitatingly, and without
careful consideration of the merits of each individual case, the
teaching--direct or inferred--of any one passage to the end of
determining the drift of the teaching of other passages. We may admit
that some passages, notably of the B/ri/hadara/n/yaka, contain at any
rate the germ of the later developed Maya doctrine[25], and thus render
it quite intelligible that a system like /S/a@nkara's should evolve
itself, among others, out of the Upanishads; but that affords no valid
reason for interpreting Maya into other texts which give a very
satisfactory sense without that doctrine, or are even clearly repugnant
to it. This remark applies in the very first place to all the accounts
of the creation of the physical universe. There, if anywhere, the
illusional character of the world should have been hinted at, at least,
had that theory been held by the authors of those accounts; but not a
word to that effect is met with anywhere. The most important of those
accounts--the one given in the sixth chapter of the Chandogya
Upanishad--forms no exception. There is absolutely no reason to assume
that the 'sending forth' of the elements from the primitive Sat, which
is there described at length, was by the writer of that passage meant to
represent a vivarta rather than a pari/n/ama that the process of the
origination of the physical universe has to be conceived as anything
else but a real manifestation of real powers hidden in the primeval
Self. The introductory words, addressed to /S/vetaketu by Uddalaka,
which are generally appealed to as intimating the unreal character of
the evolution about to be described, do not, if viewed impartially,
intimate any such thing[26]. For what is capable of being proved, and
manifestly meant to be proved, by the illustrative instances of the lump
of clay and the nugget of gold, through which there are known all things
made of clay and gold? Merely that this whole world has Brahman for its
causal substance, just as clay is the causal matter of every earthen
pot, and gold of every golden ornament, but not that the process through
which any causal substa