How Rival Vedanta Schools Rejected Illusionism

The maya doctrine became, almost immediately after Shankara's own era, the single most contested claim in later Vedanta, drawing sustained rejection from every major theistic school that followed him. Ramanuja, writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in defense of qualified nondualism, Vishishtadvaita, argued that treating the world of difference as ultimately illusory could not be reconciled with scripture's own repeated description of a real created world sustained by a real personal God, and that a doctrine reducing devotion itself to a stage to be transcended undercut the entire basis of worship. Madhva, founder of Dvaita Vedanta two centuries later, went further, treating Advaita's account of difference not merely as inadequate scripture reading but as a doctrine scripture directly contradicts, and built his own system explicitly to establish the opposite claim, that difference between God, soul and matter is real and eternal rather than a mistake awaiting correction. An Introduction to Hinduism notes that later polemical tradition sometimes labeled Shankara's position Mayavada, illusionism, as a term of reproach rather than simple description, a sign of how thoroughly the doctrine came to define the fault line separating Advaita from the theistic Vedanta schools that grew up in continuing argument against it.