The Vivekachudamani, the crest-jewel of discernment, is a Sanskrit poem on the teaching of Advaita Vedanta, and tradition attributes it to Adi Shankaracharya. Its 580 verses — 581 in some editions — open with a salutation to Govinda, the true teacher whose nature is bliss, known through the conclusions of all Vedanta yet beyond the reach of the senses. Much of it is a dialogue in which a teacher answers a disciple who asks what bondage is and how one is freed from it.
Its early verses name three rare gifts that come by divine grace — a human birth, the longing for liberation and the shelter of a great soul — and four requisites of a seeker: discernment between the lasting and the passing, dispassion, six inner disciplines beginning with calm, and that same longing. Discernment, it explains, is the firm conviction that Brahman is real and the world mithya, not real in itself. The teacher shows the Self as the witness of waking, dream and deep sleep, distinct from the five sheaths, and the dialogue closes as the disciple, freed, bows to his teacher and goes his way.
It is widely taught as an introduction to Advaita Vedanta. Swami Madhavananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Math — whose headquarters, Belur Math, is in this collection — published his English translation in 1921; Sri Ramana Maharshi, who lived at Thiruvannamalai by the hill of Arunachala, put it into Tamil prose; and Sri Chandrasekhara Bharati, the thirty-fourth Jagadguru of Sringeri, wrote a commentary on its opening 515 verses. Adi Shankaracharya is remembered at Sringeri, where tradition holds he founded the Sharada Peetham, and at Kedarnath, where one tradition holds he attained his final samadhi.