A Contemporary Interpretation of Mayavada: Advaita Vedanta and the Affirmation of the Material Universe

Mayavada (the doctrine of maya) is the Advaitin explanation of how the infinite Brahman is manifested as the finite material world. Brahman is unchanging and perfect; the locus of the changing and imperfect world. This paper has two aims. The first is to show that mayavada affirms the reality of the material world, despite the claims of Paul Deussen and Prabhu Dutt Sharstri to the contrary. To achieve this end a world-affirming mayavada is formulated based on the metaphysics of Swami Vivekananda, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Sri Aurobindo. The second aim is to show that world-affirming mayavada is a plausible metaphysical position which should be taken seriously in contemporary metaphysical debate. To achieve this some pluralist arguments against nondualism are rejected, and it is explained how world-affirming mayavada is preferable to pluralism when accounting for the ontological problems that arise from limitless decomposition and emergence due to quantum entanglement. Hence the conclusion of this paper will be that mayavada is a plausible metaphysical position which affirms the reality of the material world.