cosmos and origins
What is Maya and how does it relate to the creation of the cosmos?
What Maya actually means
Maya is often translated as illusion, but that is not quite right. The tradition does not say the world is fake or does not exist. It says the world is not ultimately real in the deepest sense. There is a difference. A dream feels completely real while you are in it. Maya points to something like that. The cosmos is genuinely experienced, but the way we experience it may not be the whole truth of what it is.
Where the idea comes from
The word Maya appears in the Rigveda, where it means a kind of mysterious power or creative force. Over time, thinkers in the Upanishadic tradition developed it into something much larger. The Mandukya Upanishad and the thinker Gaudapada explored how ordinary waking experience and dream experience may be more alike than we assume. Later, Shankara built Maya into the centre of his Advaita Vedanta school. In his view, there is only one reality, called Brahman. The appearance of a world full of separate things is superimposed on Brahman through Maya, the way a rope in dim light looks like a snake. The snake is not there, but the seeing of it is real enough.
Two ways of understanding creation
Not everyone in the tradition agreed with Shankara. Ramanuja, who founded a different school, argued that creation is a real transformation of the divine, not just an appearance. This view is called Parinamavada. Shankara's view, that the world only appears to change while Brahman stays unchanged, is called Vivartavada. These two positions are still debated. They lead to very different pictures of what creation is. In one, the cosmos is a genuine unfolding of the divine. In the other, it is more like a projection, real at the everyday level but not at the deepest level.
Maya and how we see the world
In Advaita Vedanta, Maya does two things. It hides the true nature of Brahman, and it projects the appearance of a world of many separate things. Because of Maya, a person sees themselves as a separate self, cut off from everything else. The tradition holds that this sense of separation is the root of confusion and suffering. When Maya is seen through, what remains is the understanding that the individual self and Brahman are not two different things. This is the heart of the Advaita teaching.
How people understand it today
People come to Maya from many directions. Some find it a useful way to think about why the world feels solid and permanent when nothing in it really lasts. Some connect it to questions in modern physics about the nature of matter and observation, though the tradition and physics are asking different kinds of questions. Others simply hold it as a reminder not to take the surface of things for the whole truth. The idea sits differently depending on which school of thought a person follows, and many Hindus hold it lightly rather than as a fixed doctrine.