What is Maya? (it's not just "illusion")

Maya is one of the most commonly mistranslated words in Advaita Vedanta. Translated flatly as "illusion," it gets read as "the world is fake, so none of this matters" — which is close to the opposite of what the concept is doing. Maya is better understood as the power or principle by which the one undivided Brahman appears as the many — as separate objects, separate people, distance, time, change. It's the answer to the question: if reality is genuinely one undivided thing, why does it look and feel like a world of separate, individual things? Maya is the name for whatever mechanism produces that appearance. The classic illustration is a rope mistaken for a snake in dim light. Someone sees a coiled shape on the path at dusk, and genuine fear arises — the fear is real, the perception was real, something was definitely seen. But it wasn't ultimately a snake. Once you bring a light closer, you see it was always a rope; the "snake" wasn't nothing, and it wasn't fully real either — it was a mistaken appearance superimposed on something that was actually there all along. Advaita's technical term for this kind of mistaken overlay is adhyasa, superimposition. That's the more accurate shape of the Maya claim: not "the world is nothing," but "the world's appearance of being made of separate, independent things is a superimposition on a reality that is actually one." The rope (Brahman) is real. The snake (the world experienced as fundamentally separate pieces) is not what it appears to be, without being simply nonexistent either — Advaita's term for this in-between status is mithya, meaning dependent or relative reality, neither fully real nor fully unreal. The practical consequence Advaita draws from this is not "stop caring about the world." Within ordinary, everyday life — what Advaita calls the vyavaharika or transactional level — the world, your actions, and their consequences are completely real and matter fully. It's only from the absolute (paramarthika) standpoint that the deeper claim about non-separateness applies. The two aren't in conflict; they're described as two different levels of the same reality.