Sivaachaaryas and Shankara's date

[BGS]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 09:01:28 -0500, Ravishankar Venkatraman
<sunlike at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>
>However, the point I am trying to make is that it is not something unusual
>that Sankara has not commented about Appar or Sambandhar or vice versa.
>There is a sloka in Soundaryalahiri (I think it is 75th sloka), where
>Sankara mentions that the 'Dravida sishu' got knowledge after having the
>milk served by Parvati. Here some scholers identify this sishu to be Gnana
>Sambandhar and others Sankara himself.
>
“DayAtvatyA dattam dravidasishurAsvAdy tava yat”

The scholars who contend that Sankara was born in
788 A.D have taken the third word ‘Dravidasishu’-
in the above line, as a reference to Sambandar.

According to A.Kuppuswami, who has edited and
published  the Soundaryalahari with ten noted
commentaries,there are about 32 commentaries
on the Soundaryalahari alone.The Commentators like
Lakshmidhara,kaivalyashrama,Kameswarasuri,Anandagiri,
Nrisimhasrama,and many others take the word to mean
Sankara only. In Akhandananda’s Kaivalyavardhani
gloss which is more than three centuries old
Dravidasishu is interpreted as “I Sankaracarya,
son of a Dravida brahmana”.

V.Rajgopal Sharma,in his book ACHARYA SANKARA’S
ADVENT (published by the Kaladi Sankara Math,
in 1992) states “Several hymns have
been published in the name of Acharya Sankara.
Most of them are not the compositon of Acarya
Sankara
Soundaryalahari is a composition of
another Sankaracarya of the same lineage.
The authorship of Soundaryalahari is doubtful.”

It is not known on what source modern historians
have based their identification of Dravidasishu
with Tirgnanasambandar

BGS