ADVAITA-L Digest - help locating source

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

Vidyasankar Sundaresan <vidya at CCO.CALTECH.EDU> wrote:

>This occurs as verse no. 20 and 21 in a variant form.
>
>"brahma satyam jaganmithyA iti evam rUpo viniScaya: ||20||
>so'yam nityAnityavastuviveka: samudAhr.ta: | "
>
>in the vivekacUDAmaNi. The portion "jIvobrahmaiva nA para:" is not
>found in this work. The authorship of the vivekacUDAmaNi by Sankara
>is doubted by some scholars, but the advaita tradition regards it
>as one of the most important prakaraNa granthas of Sankara's.

Do you know why it is doubted as a work of shaMkara?

>Swami Chandrasekhara Bharati has written a commentary to the vivekacUDAmaNi,
>where he explains it from a soteriological perspective, in keeping with the
>purport of verse 21. The jagat is called "mithyA" in order to reinforce the
>disciple's power of discrimination between nitya and anitya entities. Even
>if a pleasure is known to be ephemeral, men still yearn for it. On the other
>hand, if something is said to be mithyA, its attraction would be
>correspondingly
>less. Hence the guru says "jagan mithyA" essentially to encourage the student
>in nityAnityavastuviveka.

This reminds me of the statement in the gauDapaada kaarikaa, "what is unreal in
the beginning and at the end, cannot have any reality in the middle". So jagan
mithyaa _is_ in reality jagan mithyaa also. Or am I missing something here?
Maybe this interpretation is for the disciple who still has the opinion that
there is something called "objective reality"? shaMkara himself says in the
kaarikaa bhaashhya that the ajaata vaadi arguments can be understood only by
students with sharp or moderate intellects. The rest he advises to concentrate
on the "similarity" of "Om" to brahman.

Ramakrishnan.
--
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving." The other
said, "The wind is moving." The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He
told them, "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." - The Gateless Gate