“So, too, in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and the second having the complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play), magic, creative power, art, and measuring—as when one dances or draws a design to a certain measure. From this point of view the universe in general and playing in particular are, in a special sense, "meaningless": that is, they do not—like words and symbols—signify or point to something beyond themselves, just as a Mozart sonata conveys no moral or social message and does not try to suggest the natural sounds of wind, thunder, or birdsong.”

—  Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 94

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "So, too, in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and…" by Alan Watts?
Alan Watts photo
Alan Watts 107
British philosopher, writer and speaker 1915–1973

Related quotes

Alan Watts photo

“Psychotherapists … are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), p. 9

“The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.”

Richard Shweder (1945) American anthropologist

Why do Men Barbecue? (2003).

Vladimir Putin photo

“It's extremely dangerous trying to resolve political problems outside the framework of the law — first the ‘Rose Revolution', then they'll think up something like blue. [word play here: "rose" having the colloquial sense of "lesbian" in modern Russian, and "blue" meaning "gay"]”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

On the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, News conference http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/russia/article405454.ece, (23 December 2004).
On Ukraine

David Almond photo

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

André Weil photo

“An important point is that the p-adic field, or respectively the real or complex field, corresponding to a prime ideal, plays exactly the role, in arithmetic, that the field of power series in the neighborhood of a point plays in the theory of functions: that is why one calls it a local field.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

as translated by Martin H. Krieger "A 1940 letter of André Weil on analogy in mathematics." http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf Notices of the AMS 52, no. 3 (2005) pp. 334–341, quote on p. 340

John Leguizamo photo

“You grow up Latin in this country and you're a third class citizen from the word go, and so you have to deal with everything around you from that point of view and trying to feel entitled.”

John Leguizamo Freak

Freak, and proud of it - November 2, 1998.

Fred Hoyle photo

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p. 14

Hans-Georg Gadamer photo

“It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Source: Truth and Method

Margot Fonteyn photo

“Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.”

Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991) English ballerina

As quoted in Thoughts from Earth (2004) by James Randall Miller

David Bomberg photo

“Good judgement is through good drawing – from the nervous system to the sensory of the brain it is the combination of eurythmics, euphony and poetry, and when the good draughtsman draws, the muses come to dance. Then the imagination is given full play, and design happens. They then become the Muses.”

David Bomberg (1890–1957) painter

"The Bomberg Papers", An Anthology From X (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 90.

Related topics