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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 T antra Shastra.
"Mahamaya" is the sixth volume of the series "The World as Power". A comparison is made between Shakta-vada 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 contri-bution, 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. 
THE English reader is recommended to have recourse to the authors' previously published books (set out in the advertisement) for a better under-standing of the present volume. Its subject is an exposition of some aspects only of the Indian doctrine of the "World as Power" (Shakti-vada), as also a comparison between this and the better known Vedanta system called Mayavada. Both systems speak of Maya, but understand the term differently as explained in the first and following Chapters. Consequences of prime importance follow therefrom.