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the word maya occurs only once in the B@rhadara@nyaka and once only in the Pras’na.  In early Pali Buddhist writings it occurs only in the sense of deception or deceitful conduct.  Buddhagho@sa uses it in the sense of magical power.  In Nagarjuna and the Lankavatara it has acquired the sense of illusion.  In S’a@nkara the word maya is used in the sense of illusion, both as a principle of creation as a s’akti (power) or accessory cause, and as the phenomenal creation itself, as the illusion of world-appearance.

It may also be mentioned here that Gau@dapada the teacher of S’a@nkara’s teacher Govinda worked out a system with the help of the maya doctrine.  The Upani@sads are permeated with the spirit of an earnest enquiry after absolute truth.  They do not pay any attention towards explaining the world-appearance or enquiring into its relations with absolute truth.  Gau@dapada asserts clearly and probably for the first time among Hindu thinkers, that the world does not exist in reality, that it is maya, and not reality.  When the highest truth is realized maya is not removed, for it is not a thing, but the whole world-illusion is dissolved into its own airy nothing never to recur again.  It was Gau@dapada who compared the world-appearance with dream appearances, and held that objects seen in the waking world are unreal, because they are capable of being seen like objects seen in a dream, which are false and unreal.  The atman says Gau@dapada is at once the cognizer and the cognized, the world subsists in the atman through maya.  As atman alone is real and all duality an illusion, it necessarily follows that all experience is also illusory.  S’a@nkara expounded this doctrine in his elaborate commentaries on the Upani@sads and the Brahma-sutra, but he seems to me to have done little more than making explicit the doctrine of maya.  Some of his followers however examined and thought over the concept of maya and brought out in bold relief its character as the indefinable thereby substantially contributing to the development of the Vedanta philosophy.

Vedanta theory of Perception and Inference [Footnote ref 1].

Prama@na is the means that leads to right knowledge.  If memory is intended to be excluded from the definition then

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[Footnote 1:  Dharmarajadhvarindra and his son Ramak@r@s@na worked out a complete scheme of the theory of Vedantic perception and inference.  This is in complete agreement with the general Vedanta metaphysics.  The early Vedantists were more interested in demonstrating the illusory nature of the world of appearance, and did not work out a logical theory.  It may be incidentally mentioned that in the theory of inference as worked out by Dharmarajadhvarindra he was largely indebted to the Mimam@sa school of thought.  In recognizing arthapatti, upamana s’abda and anupalabdhi also Dharmarajadhvarindra accepted the Mimam@sa view.  The Vedantins, previous to Dharmarajadhvarindra, had also tacitly followed the Mimam@sa in these matters.]