Mahamaya

This reprint of Arthur Avalon’s classic work furthers our ambition to make all works of this pioneering author available again to the students and general reading public. Avalon was the first author to introduce this difficult, and hidden in secrecy, subject of Tantra Shastra. “Mahamaya” is the sixth volume of the series “The World as Power”. A comparison is made between Shaktavada and the better known Vedanta system called Mayavada. Both systems speak of Maya but understand them differently as explained in the ten chapters of this book. Its object is not to prove the truth of this or any other system, but to give an exposition of Consciousness as conceived in the doctrine of Power and in such exposition to show that it is not a mere fossil in a museum of antique thought but has practical utility today. It offers to Western philosophy a new conception of Consciousness and Mind and brings to the controversies within the Vedantic schools a profoundly conceived contribution, in its theory of power and in its doctrine of the unity of conditioned and unconditioned being, of the state of worldly experience which is Samsara and that super-worldly experience which is Moksha.