nce becomes an effect is an unreal one.
We--including Uddalaka--may surely say that all earthen pots are in
reality nothing but earth--the earthen pot being merely a special
modification (vikara) of clay which has a name of its own--without
thereby committing ourselves to the doctrine that the change of form,
which a lump of clay undergoes when being fashioned into a pot, is not
real but a mere baseless illusion.

In the same light we have to view numerous other passages which set
forth the successive emanations proceeding from the first principle.
When, for instance, we meet in the Ka/th/a Up. I, 3, 10, in the serial
enumeration of the forms of existence intervening between the gross
material world and the highest Self (the Person), with the
'avyak/ri/ta,' the Undeveloped, immediately below the purusha; and when
again the Mu/nd/aka Up. II, 1, 2, speaks of the 'high Imperishable'
higher than which is the heavenly Person; there is no reason whatever to
see in that 'Undeveloped' and that 'high Imperishable' anything but that
real element in Brahman from which, as in the Ramanuja system, the
material universe springs by a process of real development. We must of
course render it quite clear to ourselves in what sense the terms 'real'
and 'unreal' have to be understood. The Upanishads no doubt teach
emphatically that the material world does not owe its existence to any
principle independent from the Lord like the pradhana of the Sa@nkhyas;
the world is nothing but a manifestation of the Lord's wonderful power,
and hence is unsubstantial, if we take the term 'substance' in its
strict sense. And, again, everything material is immeasurably inferior
in nature to the highest spiritual principle from which it has emanated,
and which it now hides from the individual soul. But neither
unsubstantiality nor inferiority of the kind mentioned constitutes
unreality in the sense in which the Maya of /S/a@nkara is unreal.
According to the latter the whole world is nothing but an erroneous
appearance, as unreal as the snake, for which a piece of rope is
mistaken by the belated traveller, and disappearing just as the imagined
snake does as soon as the light of true knowledge has risen. But this is
certainly not the impression left on the mind by a comprehensive review
of the Upanishads which dwells on their general scope, and does not
confine itself to the undue urging of what may be implied in some
detached passages. The Upanishads do not c