Vedanta. The easy government of Allahabad
had assisted his natural inclination, and with the help of a band of pandits he had made a Persian
version of the Upanishads. The title of Majmua-ul-Baharain ("the Mingling of Two Oceans")
which he gave to another of his works, as well
as his prefatory remarks,[1] proves that his aim
was to find a meeting-point for Hinduism and
Islam in those universal truths which form the
common basis of all true religions and which
fanatics are too apt to ignore in their zeal for
the mere externals of faith. Alike from the Hindu
yogi Lál-dás and the Muslim faqir Sarmad, he
had imbibed his eclectic philosophy, and at the
feet of both he had sat as an attentive pupil.
But he was no apostate from Islam. He had
compiled a biography of Muslim saints, and he
had been initiated as a disciple of the Muslim
- ↑ He writes that although he had perused the Pentateuch, the Gospels, the Psalms and other sacred books, he had nowhere found the doctrine of Tauhid or Pantheism explicitly taught but in the Vedas, and more especially in the Upanishads, which contain their essence. As Benares, the great seat of Hindu learning, was under his rule, he called together the most learned pandits of that place, and with their assistance wrote himself the translation of the Upanishads (Rieu, i. 54, quoting preface to Sirr-ul-asrar). Elsewhere he states that he had embraced the doctrine of the Sufis, and having ascertained in his intercourse with Hindu Fakirs that their divergence from the former was merely verbal, he had written the Majmua-ul-Baharain with the object of reconciling the two systems. (Rieu, ii. 828, quoting Dara's preface).
