OTOH, in the Veda it's written: Brahman says, "My indestructible maya." And Maharishi has explained that at the deepest level of every cell of our body, Purusha IS Prakriti.
I think it can be understood from this perspective from Maharishi: knowledge is different in different state of consciousness. On Monday, November 11, 2013 8:33 AM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: Seraphita wrote: (snip) > Re "In Buddhism, the “self” is the ego (the “I”) – a conceptual construct > that is quite > unreal. In Advaita, the Self is the only “truly Real” and is the basis of all > concepts.": > So what you're saying is that Buddhists and Vedantists have been talking at >cross- > purposes for centuries when they speak of the s/Self: how comical is that? Seems to me anyone who is familiar with both traditions understands that they each deny "true reality" to the self (lower-case) but differ as to whether there is a Self (capitalized). However, it's awfully tempting to equate Nirvana with the Self (Atman/Brahman). >From the Udana, attributed to the Buddha: "There is, monks, that plane where there is neither extension, nor motion, nor the plane of infinite ether.... nor that of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, neither this world nor another, neither the moon nor the sun. Here, monks, I say that there is no coming or going or remaining or deceasing or uprising, for this is itself without support, without continuance in samsara, without mental object - this is itself the end of suffering. "There is, monks, an unborn, not become, unmade, uncompounded, and were it not, monks, for this unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, no escape could be shown here for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded. But because there is, monks, an unborn, not become, unmade, uncompounded, therefore an escape can be shown, for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded." http://buddha-dharma.net/contributions/buddhism%26vedanta.html Also interesting are the apparent parallels between the descriptions of Brahman/the Uncompounded and the descriptions of God in classical theism (e.g., Aquinas). Of course, the map is not the territory, but the territory seems to have given rise to remarkably similar conceptual maps in this regard. Finally, according to Maharishi, Maya is "that which is not"--but the illusion involved is not that Maya is not real, but rather that it isn't Brahman. (Fire when ready, empty. You da man here.)
