all upon us to look upon the
whole world as a baseless illusion to be destroyed by knowledge; the
great error which they admonish us to relinquish is rather that things
have a separate individual existence, and are not tied together by the
bond of being all of them effects of Brahman, or Brahman itself. They do
not say that true knowledge sublates this false world, as /S/a@nkara
says, but that it enables the sage to extricate himself from the
world--the inferior murta rupa of Brahman, to use an expression of the
B/ri/hadara/n/yaka--and to become one with Brahman in its highest form.
'We are to see everything in Brahman, and Brahman in everything;' the
natural meaning of this is, 'we are to look upon this whole world as a
true manifestation of Brahman, as sprung from it and animated by it.'
The mayavadin has indeed appropriated the above saying also, and
interpreted it so as to fall in with his theory; but he is able to do so
only by perverting its manifest sense. For him it would be appropriate
to say, not that everything we see is in Brahman, but rather that
everything we see is out of Brahman, viz. as a false appearance spread
over it and hiding it from us.

Stress has been laid[27] upon certain passages of the B/ri/hadara/n/yaka
which seem to hint at the unreality of this world by qualifying terms,
indicative of duality or plurality of existence, by means of an added
'iva,' i.e. 'as it were' (yatranyad iva syat; yatra dvaitam iva bhavati;
atma dhyayativa lelayativa). Those passages no doubt readily lend
themselves to Maya interpretations, and it is by no means impossible
that in their author's mind there was something like an undeveloped Maya
doctrine. I must, however, remark that they, on the other hand, also
admit of easy interpretations not in any way presupposing the theory of
the unreality of the world. If Yaj/n/avalkya refers to the latter as
that 'where there is something else as it were, where there is duality
as it were,' he may simply mean to indicate that the ordinary opinion,
according to which the individual forms of existence of the world are
opposed to each other as altogether separate, is a mistaken one, all
things being one in so far as they spring from--and are parts
of--Brahman. This would in no way involve duality or plurality being
unreal in /S/a@nkara's sense, not any more than, for instance, the modes
of Spinoza are unreal because, according to that philosopher, there is
only one universal subs