CHAP. XII.] HIS RELIGIOUS LIBERALITY. 297 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,* 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 explicit- ly 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 Upa- nishads (Rieu, i. 54, quoting preface to Sirr-ul-asrar). Else- where 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). Digitized by Microsoft Ⓡ
