The Discovery Of India - pg. 46

So we find in India, as elsewhere, these two streams of thought and action - the acceptance of life and the abstention from it - developing side by side, with the emphasis on the one or the other varying in different periods. Yet the basic background of that culture was not one of otherworldliness or world-worthlessness. Even when, in philosophical language, it discussed the world as maya, or what is popularly believed to be illusion, that very conception was not an absolute one but relative to what was thought of as ultimate reality (something like Plato's shadow of reality), and it took the world as it is and tried to live its life and enjoy its manifold beauty.