According to Śaṅkara, the Advaita doctrine was more profound because it entailed understanding the diversity of the everyday world as being all the same.•In Advaita, the world is not entirely present nor entirely an illusion, but rather never entirely provable in its true form.•The world may seem to change as our state of consciousness can change, but there is still something real behind what we perceive.•For example, we may think a rope is a snake at one distance, but closer up, as our understanding changes, we know that it is only a snake. However, the rope is not an illusion.