I came across this unorthodox quote by Prabhupada in the Introduction of the Sri Isopanisad:

Sankaracarya is supposed to be an impersonalist who preached impersonalism, impersonal Brahman, but it is a fact that he is a covered personalist. In his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita he wrote, " Narayana, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is beyond this cosmic manifestation." And then again he conformed, "That Supreme Personality of Godhead, Narayana, is Krsna. He has come as the son of Devaki and Vasudeva." He particularly mentioned the names of his mother and father. So Krsna is accepted as the Supreme Personality of Godhead by all transcendentalists. There is no doubt about it (p.6).

he was a secret agent

I also came across this, by a devotee, which also made me smile:

"I studied advaita philosophy for about 3 years before Krishna set me straight, but still if I think about advaita, I get bewildered by it and need hurry to the Bhagavad-gita As It Is for shelter. I think I would have been better off as a heroin junkie than a student of advaita philosophy. Not much difference, really."

Another devotee quote:

"Chaitanya said to not to read Advaitic literature, period. Specifically, He said that one who reads it, everything will get spoiled and destroyed (mayavadi-bhasya sunile haya sarva-nasa)."

I can't say I entirely disagree.

There is also this funny controversy about the famous Shridhar Swami , the authoritative commentator of the Gita , who lived in pre-chaityanic times .

Even already Chaitanya and his contemporaries said that his purports were the most important reference for all the commentators who followed him , what to speak of later acharyas .

But it seems that not everything is very clear concerning his affiliations to a particular school or sampradaya .
Because , as far as I understood it , the gaudiyas seem to claim that he was a vaishnava or Krishna-bhakta at heart , whereas his official affiliation was with the shankarites .

Interesting , though .

Unorthodox? How so? The idea is not Bhuktivedanta's. It is much older. Bhuktivedanta, of course, speaks about things he does not know anything about, but that is nothing new.

When I say unorthodox I do not mean it is unorthodox to say that there is personalism in Advaita or that Sankara is Vaisnava. I have been unsuccesfully trying to communicate variations of this for a while. What I mean is that it is unorthodox of Prabhupada to say considering that he spends a good portion of his commentaries slamming Mayavadis as impersonalist, but now he is saying they are hidden personalists.

It gives me even more reason to pause than Ananta Das Babaji's statement that Mayavadis are to be avoided because they are hidden Buddhists. There seems to be some kind of stock tournure of phrase to call other schools of thought hidden this or hidden that. I think it would be so much better if any school would just focus on its own teachings only instead of bothering to speak of other schools at all. Most of the time they only end up explaining surface understandings and looking just plain reductionistic and insular, even though I am sure the intent is the opposite.

Anyway even more unorthodox is Prabhupada taking pains to call Sankara a transcendentalist and a Vaisvava beyond a shadow of a doubt. In this light that would make Prabhupada's compulsive slamming of Mayavadis a form of Vaisnava aparadha. I figure the answer to that is no!

He is talking about Shankaracharya here. Shankaracharya is not a Mayavadi.
Some of the "Shankarite" followers extant in Chaitanya's time are Mayavadis because they adhered to to a form of subjective idealism akin to certain Buddhist schools. This subjective idealism was propagated by a mediaeval advaitin Prakashananda. Some scholars of Advaita Vedanta argue that such a propagation is repugnant to the Advaita espoused by Shankara.

This is touched upon in Prof, Eliot Deutsch's book, Advaita Vedanta, A Philosophical Reconstruction, University of Hawaii Press. I mentioned this to you some time ago. Unfortunately you seem more intent on going around in circles on this issue.

You seem to have misunderstood my word meanings. I use the term Sankarite, Mayavadi and Advaitan interchangeably when talking about Prabhupada and with those who follow or followed him because that is how Prabhupada meant it which is what counts. Yes Sankara is not a Mayavadi in the sense that Gaudiyas define it but I use the term anyway in the context of the audience just like Prabhupada used it.

This idea that Caitanya was objecting against a group of Advaitans caught in the degenerate pitfalls of Advaita is an idea I have expressed elsewhere myself.

The Buddhist form of subjective idealism is the Madhyamika school and Nagarjuna. Even in this most extreme school there is no absolute subjective idealism. After Nagarjuna takes every other kind of view apart he then turns on his own view and his own tools. Not even subjective idealism itself is immune to deconstruction for the Nagarjunaites.

Nothing wrong with going around in circles that is what Ravel did in Bolero and he constructed a masterpiece!

Yep. And I always wondered -- long before leaving ISKCON -- why the "mayavadi" literature (I believe he meant Sankara's Gita commentary) might have such an impact even on a "fixed-up" bhakta. What kind of ideas can have the power to forever destroy his ability to see the Gita with the eyes of bhakti?

Sankara is supposed to be wrong, right? Then why wouldn't a bhakta be able to see it?

There is only one possibility my left brain hemisphere can think of, where an idea ABC would irrevocably destroy one's ability to believe in XYZ: if XYZ is an ignorance of something, and ABC presents the facts about that thing in an empirically convincing way.

Like, once you have found out what the difference is between boys and girls, you can't un-know it again. You are doomed to know it.

I am not into Sankara. But that terrifying warning by Sri Caitanya just doesn't square.

Now we're getting somewhere!

I once read into a Hungarian translation of Shankara's Sariraka-bhasya while being an Iskconer. I don't really remember anything about it, and I still didn't become a Mayavadi/Shankarite/Advaitin or whatever.

But I blooped.

Interesting that the Gaudiyas mention books which are purportedly able to instantly destroy all devotion, but they don't speak about books which could promptly give one prema upon one reading. Are Mayavadi books more powerful?

Ignorance may be obliterated in a flash
but enlightenment not so quickly.