What is Māyā in the Bhagavad Gita?
Māyā is often translated as illusion, which overstates it. The word is closer to a power of making or measuring out, and in the Gita it names the quality of appearance that stands between a person and what is actually there.
The Gita does not say the world is unreal. 7.14 calls māyā divine and hard to get past, and says those who take refuge cross it, which treats it as a condition to be seen through rather than a lie to be exposed. 7.25 gives the practical version: the divine is not obvious to everyone, being veiled, so people do not recognise what they are looking at.
The word also does work in 18.61, where all beings are described as mounted on a machine and turned by a power seated in the heart of each. That image has unsettled readers for a long time, and it is placed two verses before Krishna hands Arjuna the decision and tells him to do as he chooses. The Gita leaves those two facts side by side without reconciling them, which is more honest than most attempts to resolve it.
The verses 5
4.6
Though I am unborn and do not decay, though I am the lord of what exists - I take up my own nature and come into being by my own power.
7.14
This divine play of mine, made of the three states, is very hard to get past.
7.15
They do not come to me: those who do harm, those lost in confusion, the lowest of people, whose understanding has been carried off, who have taken the cruel side.
7.25
I am not on show to everyone.
18.61
The lord sits in the heart of every being, Arjuna, and by his power he turns them all about, as though they were mounted on a machine.