Is the World an Illusion?

Some text books on non-dual philosophy tell us that Shankaracharya designated the ultimate Reality by the term ‘nirguna Brahman’ or quality-less Brahman. They say he thought this was quality-less, changeless and beyond the realm of cause and effect. If we are to look, therefore, in his system for the cause of the universe of qualities spread out before us, we must turn to his conception of ‘saguna Brahman’—Brahman with qualities, that is, associated with the creative power, Maya.

Saguna Brahman is thus taken to be the principle that mediates between the changeless Reality and the world of changing forms. It is also said to be called Ishvara. And, since Reality is actionless and quality-less, both Ishvara and the world are illusory.

Sometimes those who expound Shankara in this way and take the term nirguna to mean without features, declare that nirguna Brahman is a bare abstraction, an empty concept, not merely less than reality, but actually indistinguishable from non-reality.

In the following paragraphs an attempt is made to show why these interpretations are mistaken. Our view is that nirguna Brahman is not an empty concept; there is not, in Shankara’s own writings, a special metaphysical principle called Ishvara postulated to mediate between the changeless and the changing; and the external world is not an illusory system of qualities that contrives for a time to overspread and hide the qualityless Reality.

Nirguna Brahman is not an empty word or a mere concept. It is the supreme fact. Our ordinary empirical experience of facts conditioned by time, space and causation does not yield knowledge of anything that exists independently.

Nirguna Brahman is the name for the supreme fact, the fact that exists independently, and on which all other facts depend. It is called nirguna in the Upanishads and by Shankara, not because it is quality-less, but because it is not a substance in which qualities in any sense independent from itself inhere. It is not a concept, because it is not known or knowable by the mind. It is known by anubhava or immediate experience. It is infinite, and the limited mind merely obscures it.

When do we know this reality in direct experience? We know it when we realise that all finite things have no existence independent of it. We know it because we are it, and its nature is knowledge. We cannot know it through scripture, though scripture points the way. Scripture is the record of the anubhava of the enlightened sages. It is partly distorted by the fact of its having to be written in words. Words stand for limited conceptions and inevitably deform the infinite Reality.

Nevertheless manana, or mental cogitation, is part of the discipline for approaching the knowledge of Brahman, and therefore we find in the Upanishads and in Shankara descriptions of Brahman involving conceptions which are familiar to the mind. They are not strictly true of Brahman as such, but are intended to direct the mind towards Brahman. But when these passages are known from the context to be descriptive, it is to Brahman that they refer, and Brahman is always nirguna.

With this in mind we can see the cause of the second misconception discussed in this paper. The scripture speaks of Brahman as being nirguna and also as being the cause of the world. Now we find in Shankara’s writings a conception of saguna Brahman or Brahman with qualities. Hence it is said that nirguna Brahman cannot be the cause of anything, and that saguna Brahman, must be the cause of the world.

This view is indeed found in some later writers, but not in Shankara or his closest followers.