Shankara on Avidya (nescience)

If, says Śaṅkara, you demand to know to whom this ‘not-being-awake-to-the-Self’ (aprabodha) belongs, we reply, ‘To you who ask this question’.

If you were awake (prabuddha) to this, you would see that in truth no nescience exists anywhere for anyone. 

Śaṅkara argues in a rather similar way in his Gītā Commentary. First he asserts that nescience does not afflict the true Self. 

Then he brings forward a pupil who wants to know what it does afflict if it does not afflict the Self. It afflicts, he is told, whatever it is perceived to afflict.

To ask further ‘What is that?’ is a useless question, since one cannot perceive nescience at all without perceiving the one afflicted by it. 

Śaṅkara so conducts the remainder of the argument that the pupil has to admit that, because he cannot help perceiving the one afflicted with nescience, he cannot himself be the one afflicted with nescience.

Thus bondage is an illusion and enlightenment does not imply any real change of state. Enlightenment does not so much destroy nescience as reveal that it never existed.

~A J Alston fom 'Sankara on the Absolute' p.88