Advaita Vedanta uses two closely related terms for the mechanism that keeps ultimate reality from being seen clearly, and the difference between them is a difference of scale rather than kind. Maya operates at the level of the cosmos: it is the power by which the one, undifferentiated Brahman appears as the manifold world of names and forms, the general condition that makes a universe of separate-seeming things possible at all. Avidya, usually translated as ignorance, operates at the level of an individual mind: it is the specific, personal failure to recognise one’s own identity with that same Brahman.
The two are not independent forces. Avidya is often described as maya operating locally, the same covering power considered from the vantage point of a particular experiencer rather than the cosmos as a whole. A useful analogy, offered as illustration rather than a precise equivalence, is the relationship between a general physical law and its specific instance: gravity is a cosmic-scale regularity, and a particular falling stone is that same regularity showing up at one place and time. Maya is to avidya roughly as the general law is to the specific case.
This distinction resolves a question that otherwise looks like a contradiction. If Brahman is the sole reality, why does ignorance of it feel so personal, so tied to this individual mind and no other? The maya-avidya framework answers that the personal experience of not-knowing is simply the cosmic condition of appearance, viewed from inside one particular vantage point within that appearance. Removing avidya, in this account, does not require altering the cosmos. It requires a shift in recognition at exactly the point where the individual mind is standing.
Both terms describe a covering, not an absence, which raises the next question directly: if reality is not literally split into many things, why does experience so persistently present it as many rather than one? That is the specific puzzle taken up several pieces ahead in this series, but its groundwork is laid immediately next, in the two competing accounts of how the one becomes many at all.
Part 36 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
Series I: From the BeginningThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline