In the Rigveda, maya is extraordinary power, the illusion-craft of Indra and Varuna. By the Upanishads it becomes the cosmic counterpart of avidya, individual ignorance: the power giving rise to the phenomenal world. Shankara, eighth century, made it Advaita's cornerstone: Brahman's mysterious shakti concealing the real and projecting the unreal, the rope mistaken for a snake in dim light. The formal status: anirvachaniya, neither real, since it vanishes with knowledge, nor unreal, since it has tangible effects while it lasts. Two truths result: vyavaharika, transactional reality, and paramarthika, the ultimate.
The illusion reading was contested from inside: Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita made maya Vishnu's real creative power, the world as genuine manifestation; Madhva's Dvaita rejected the veil outright, the world is real and eternally distinct. Even Shankara's own metaphor betrays the problem: the rope-snake error is corrected by lamplight, meaning the veil is a perception problem, not a world problem. The modern secular descendants: Plato's cave, the simulation argument, predictive processing's controlled hallucination, the Buddha's net, each rebuilding maya without the metaphysics.
The claim: the etymology is the doctrine, ma, to measure, means Maya is not a curtain hiding reality but the act of measuring it, the world of distinct things is what reality looks like after being measured, named, and archived, so the veil is woven by the same hands that weave the dictionary. Verdict: the philology supports it, and it lands on this archive's own doorstep: every entry here is a measurement, a naming, a maya-making. The tradition's answer is not to stop measuring but to know the ruler's limits. File the veil under: things you cannot remove, only calibrate.
If the illusion is what gets measured, is the tape measure part of the trick?