Maya / Mara
It was Schopenhauer who realized that Kant’s a priori forms of
sensibility and the a priori categories of logic were simply equivalent
to the Hindu idea of Maya. So these two philosophies –
European rationalism and Indian mysticism – flow together marvelously in the
work of the nineteenth-century German Romantics. Schopenhauer
asks in a beautiful paper of his called “The Foundations of Morality” how it is
that a human being can so experience the pain and danger of another that,
forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s
rescue? You see a little child about to be run over and
you’ll probably be the one who’s run over. How is it that
what we think of as the first law of nature, the law of protecting this separate
entity, is suddenly dispelled and a new law takes precedence: that of what
Schopenhauer calls Mitleid (“compassion”; literally translated as
“suffering with”)? Schopenhauer says the reason is that in
truth a
metaphysical realization has come to you and has broken through the veil of
separateness – you realize that you and that other are one.
You are, together, the one life that is showing itself in various forms.
That’s the breakthrough to where
the gods are; a god is
simply a mythological
representation of these mysteries transcendent of separateness.
G18
A
Maya
It was Schopenhauer who first recognized that the Indian concept of maya
and
Kant’s concept of the forms of sensibility and the categories of logic were
equivalent. TMTT 131