In Advaita Vedānta, māyā is understood as the principle or power by which the one, non-dual Brahman appears as the manifold universe and as countless individual beings. Brahman alone is held to be absolutely real, while the world that is experienced is neither sheer nothingness nor ultimately real in the same sense; it is described as having a provisional or empirical reality. Māyā is thus the cosmic factor that allows multiplicity, change, and diversity to arise in what is, at the deepest level, one undifferentiated reality. It is often spoken of as the creative power of Brahman, through which all forms, objects, and individual consciousness come to appear as distinct.

This power is closely tied to the notion of illusion, but not in the crude sense of something utterly nonexistent. Illusion here means misapprehension: taking the changing world of names and forms as ultimately real and independent, and overlooking the underlying Brahman. Māyā both veils the true nature of Brahman and projects the appearance of duality and multiplicity, giving rise to the sense of a separate “I” and a world of others. Because of this misperception, there arises ignorance, attachment, and the experience of bondage and suffering, all within the realm of empirical reality.

Advaita Vedānta therefore distinguishes between two levels of reality. On the transactional or empirical level, the world, body, mind, karma, and dharma operate, and within this domain māyā has force and validity. On the absolute level, however, Brahman alone is real, and from that standpoint māyā and the world have no independent reality of their own. A classic illustration is the rope-snake example: in dim light, a rope is mistaken for a snake. The rope corresponds to Brahman, the snake to the world-appearance produced by māyā, and the error of taking the snake as real reflects ignorance.

At the individual level, this same principle is called avidyā, the ignorance of one’s true nature as Brahman. Under the sway of avidyā, consciousness identifies with body and mind, and the provisional reality of the world is taken as final. Through knowledge (jñāna) of Brahman, this ignorance is dispelled, and with its removal the hold of māyā is broken. What remains is not the destruction of the world as such, but the clear recognition that its reality is only relative, while Brahman alone stands as the unchanging ground.