Maya [Wordly Attachment]

I stayed in Delhi for some time due to work. During that period, I used to travel to the office by auto rickshaw. The distance from home to office wasn’t much, barely 15 minutes. And many of the auto drivers in Delhi had this habit of striking up a conversation about something or the other.

As for me, I would usually just nod along and get off at my stop.

One day, there was an elderly auto driver. As we were crossing the Kalka Devi bridge, a bike came up beside us. There were three people on it — most likely a father and his two young children.

The father was seated in front, with a little boy in the middle, who looked around five or six years old. Behind him sat his sister, maybe a year or two older. For a little while, their bike and our rickshaw were going side by side.

The young boy was sitting without holding onto anything, while his sister kept asking him to hold on to their father. But he wasn’t listening. So, finally, she stretched both her arms forward, trying to grab their father’s shirt to help steady her brother.

But her little hands couldn’t reach all the way to their father’s shirt from either side.

In the end, she held on to her brother with her left hand and leaned forward slightly to clutch their father’s shirt with her right.

The auto driver and I had both witnessed this entire scene.

Then the driver spoke up. He had also observed that little effort by the siblings. Speaking in Hindi, he said,
“Sahab, maya [worldly attahment] is a strange thing. Such a small girl, and yet she’s worried that her little brother might fall off.”

As usual, I just nodded. But even after I got off the rickshaw, that thought wouldn’t leave my mind.

We often joke or sometimes even speak seriously, saying, “Sab maya hai” (It’s all an illusion).

A small being is born, whether human or animal and that being is inevitably surrounded by the maya of its parents. In the case of humans, it’s often extended to other relatives too. It’s this maya that compels them to care for the little one, and from there, everything continues to unfold.

Our English teacher in school, whenever topics like the end of the world came up, would say,
“Nothing to worry about. The world will end only when the maya of the parents ends.”

It is maya that drives our lives, the reason we grow attached not just to living beings, but even to inanimate objects.

We take greater care of our expensive car than even our own well-being. Gold, money, property, disputes over ancestral land, this attachment lies at the heart of it all.

Maybe that’s why money is often referred to as “maya.”

I had heard that a lot is written about maya in the Bhagavad Gita, so I looked it up online and learned:
“Maya casts a veil over reality and creates an illusion. It is not just illusion itself, but also the mechanism through which illusion is created. Overcoming maya means surrendering to the Creator and understanding the temporary nature of the material world.”

But renouncing maya is rarely possible for ordinary people like us. Those who succeed in doing so become Buddhas, saints, or sages.