Shankara’s māyā

Śaṅkara was an Indian philosopher of the Advaita (“non-dual”) Vedānta school. The Stanford Encyclopedia puts him in the eighth century AD. His thesis is short. Only Brahman, pure consciousness, is ultimately real. The many things of the world, you and me included, are māyā: an appearance laid over Brahman. His favourite picture is a rope in poor light. You see a snake, you jump, your heart races. When a lamp comes, the snake is gone, but it never was anything except the rope.

You might expect him to say the world is just a dream. He doesn’t. In his commentary on the Brahmasūtra (2.2.28–29) he argues against the Buddhist Yogācāra school, Vasubandhu’s school, that waking life isn’t like a dream. A dream is cancelled when you wake up. The waking world isn’t cancelled by anything you can reach from inside it. So he gives reality levels. The everyday world is real for every practical purpose: you can eat the food and the fire burns. It just isn’t the last word.

The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, a long Sanskrit poem whose date scholars still argue about, tells the idea as stories. In one, a magician waves a fan of peacock feathers in front of King Lavaṇa. For a moment the king sits frozen. In that moment he lives a whole life far away as an outcast. He marries, raises children, survives a famine and is about to throw himself into a fire when he wakes on his throne. Later he travels to the hills and finds the village, and people there who remember the famine.

For the simulation hypothesis, Advaita gives a ready answer to the worry that a simulated world would be fake. It would be real at its own level, the way the waking world is for Śaṅkara, and not the deepest level. The Lavaṇa story adds something the sandbox can count. A lifetime can fit in a moment of outside time, and what was lived still leaves marks other people can find.