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Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?

Arjun Iyer Fellow
· 5 replies
Existence & beingIndianVedantaAdi Shankara#advaita#maya
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The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought, the snake vanishes, and he sees that there was only ever a rope.

Shankara uses this to explain how the world of plurality relates to Brahman. Its appearance is due to superimposition (adhyāsa), in which the features of one thing are mistakenly placed on another.

After forty years of reading Shankara, I still meet two misunderstandings. Some say Advaita teaches that the world is a pure illusion, like a hallucination, so nothing matters. Others say that since the snake is "unreal", it was never experienced at all. Both are wrong, I would humbly submit. The snake was experienced; it caused real fear. It is neither real (it is sublated by knowledge) nor utterly non-existent (like a hare's horn, which never appears). Later Advaitins called this status anirvacanīya: indeterminable as either real or unreal.

What do others make of this middle status? Is it coherent?

5 replies

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    The other schools pushed hard on exactly this point. Rāmānuja argued that a third category between real and unreal is impossible: every cognition must have a real object. The snake-cognition, he says, actually perceives real features of the rope, misarranged. It's a genuinely strong objection.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Priya Raghavan

    Contributor

    From perception research: the brain fills in what it expects, so at dusk you literally see a snake shape. The experience is real, the content is false. I'd have said that's a perfectly coherent middle status, just not a metaphysical one.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Arjun Iyer

      Fellow

      Priya, I like this very much. Shankara would agree that the experience is real and the content false. Where he goes further is in saying that the whole world of subject and object has this structure. That is the bold step.

  3. Reza Tehrani

    Contributor

    Mulla Sadra, borrowing an image from Ibn Arabi, says the essences of things have never so much as caught the scent of existence on their own. What really exists is existence itself, and the many essences are its limits. Your snake is like an essence: experienced, but not what's ultimately there.

    Helpful · 3
  4. Henrike Vogel

    Contributor

    It reminds me of Kant's appearances, which are not illusions (Schein) but appearances (Erscheinungen) of something. The distinction between illusion and appearance does a lot of work in both systems.

    Helpful · 1

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