he word maya occurs only once in the B@rhadara@nyaka and once
only in the Pras'na. In early Pali Buddhist writings it occurs
only in the sense of deception or deceitful conduct. Buddhagho@sa
uses it in the sense of magical power. In Nagarjuna and the _Lankavatara_
it has acquired the sense of illusion. In S'a@nkara the
word maya is used in the sense of illusion, both as a principle
of creation as a s'akti (power) or accessory cause, and as the
phenomenal creation itself, as the illusion of world-appearance.

It may also be mentioned here that Gau@dapada the teacher
of S'a@nkara's teacher Govinda worked out a system with the help
of the maya doctrine. The Upani@sads 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. Gau@dapada 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. It was Gau@dapada who compared
the world-appearance with dream appearances, and held that objects
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 Gau@dapada 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. S'a@nkara expounded
this doctrine in his elaborate commentaries on the Upani@sads
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 indefinable
thereby substantially contributing to the development of
the Vedanta philosophy.

Vedanta theory of Perception and Inference [Footnote ref 1].

Prama@na is the means that leads to right knowledge. If
memory is intended to be excluded from the definition then

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[Footnote 1: Dharmarajadhvarindra and his son Ramak@r@s@na worked out a
complete scheme of the theory of Vedantic perception and inference