Why the world looks straight at the Lord and still does not see him

Advaita Vedānta

Yoga-maya is read in terms of the gunas and beginningless ignorance. One reading takes yoga as the joining or contriving of the three qualities of nature, and that very joining is maya, hence yoga-maya; the veil covers both the unconditioned form and the conditioned form. Another voice traces the cause back to beginningless, indefinable non-knowledge that is the lack of discrimination, so the world's folly about the Lord springs from this primordial ignorance. A further voice ties the veil tightly to the Lord's own resolve: the maya follows his will, the wish that the non-devotee should not know him in his own form, and so it covers an existing real thing while showing a non-existent thing, just as ordinary worldly maya does. These voices also note the deluded world is precisely the world outside the circle of devotees, and they reject as forced the reading of yoga-maya as a 'supreme yogic skill,' preferring the simple sense of the gunas or indefinable ignorance.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Yoga-maya is read as the joining or arrangement of a human form, the body and the rest, that the Lord shares with embodied field-knowers. Because people see only this human arrangement in him, the deluded world fails to know him, even though his deeds surpass the wind and Indra, his splendour surpasses sun and fire, and he is unborn, imperishable, the single cause of the whole world, the Lord of all. He took on the human arrangement precisely so that all might take refuge in him. The inner reality is veiled by yoga-maya, the Lord's own power of self-concealment that preserves the inwardness of the manifest; the candidate who would see through must take the refuge taught earlier in the chapter and offer worship, and the seeing-through is the candidate's part within the Lord's gracious self-disclosure.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

Yoga-maya is the very union of lordly powers, and by it the Lord is concealed, because maya is the cause of the veiling. So the deluded world does not recognize the unborn, imperishable Lord. Yet, this voice adds, the Lord himself remains all-knowing: he knows the beings that are past, present, and to come, but no one knows him.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

The ignorance of the Lord is by his own will. Here yoga is read as the means that is his power, and maya as a distinct power alongside it, so that 'by yoga' and 'by maya' name two real things and are not collapsed into one. This reading deliberately sets aside the Advaitin gloss that 'yoga itself is maya'; both 'yoga' as capacity-means and 'maya' as a particular kind of means must carry their own weight, or the word 'by maya' would be purposeless. It is by the Lord alone that the deluded one fails to know him. The whole point is that the ignorance by which people regard him otherwise is dependent on his will, not independent, so that this censure should bring him no distress; the Padma Purana corroborates that the great Lord, by his own power and by the goddess, brings about both his self-veiling and the binding of the world's mind.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

Yoga-maya is the Bhagavan's own screen, not an alien curtain drawn by some other power. He withdraws it by his choice for those he wills to draw, and keeps it in place for those who have not yet received grace. The veiling is for the sake of yoga, of union, and for the sake of rasa, the savor of loving relationship: the inner maya has become his handmaid, and by that power he stands screened. He does not become manifest to everyone in common but only to some one devotee. The deluded world, lacking reflection on bhakti and the knowledge that springs from it, looking only outward, does not know him even while gazing upon him: the unborn one become manifest in play, the eternal one whom they fail to see on every side, in every mood.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

Yoga-maya is taken with full seriousness as the Lord's own gracious veil, not a screen thrown up by ignorance from below; one voice calls it some unfathomable, wholly inconceivable play of his wisdom, the dexterity of bringing about the impossible, lifted only at his will for his own. A vivid image is offered: as the sun, screened by Mount Meru, is not visible to all at all times but only sometimes and in certain regions, so the Lord, ever shining with his qualities, play, and entourage, is veiled by yoga-maya which stands in Meru's place; hence the Krishna-sun is not always visible even in his own realms of Mathura and Dvaraka. The deluded world does not recognize him in his dark, beautiful form, the son of Vasudeva, free of illusory birth; and for this very reason some abandon even him, the ocean of auspicious qualities, and worship only his impersonal Brahman-nature. Another voice adds that the people are made blind by being shut up in his cosmic yoga and cannot see him by the light of day, though there is nothing in the whole world in which he does not abide, as there is no water without fluidity and no place without sky.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

Briefly stated: he does not come within the range of all.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These voices read the verse in varied modern keys. One holds that yoga-maya is the union of the three qualities of nature, the creative illusion that veils the understanding of the worldly-minded, who are screened off by this universe of nature's qualities and cannot behold the Lord who keeps maya under perfect control. Another, in a non-dualist key, treats yoga-maya as the device of giving up the imperceptible form and taking the perceptible one: the perceptible universe is mayic and non-permanent, the Paramesvara alone is real and permanent, and the very words 'foolish' and 'deluded' show that this maya, called a wonderful power by some, is finally an appearance created by ignorance. A third notes only that the Lord has the power to create this world of sense yet is unaffected by it, which makes his power unique. A fourth, non-sectarian devotional voice says the Lord is unborn and undying yet makes a play of appearing and disappearing, like the sun that comes before us at sunrise and hides at sunset; there are two causes of the world's not knowing him, his remaining hidden by yoga-maya and the person's own folly. That folly is rooted in forgetting one's own natural belonging to the Lord and taking the body as one's self, so one assumes the Lord is also born and dying; the jiva can remove its own folly, but full knowledge of the Lord's reality comes only by his grace, and only he whom the Lord wishes to make known can know him.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Mahatma Gandhi · Swami Ramsukhdas