Dara Shikoh
The mingling of the two oceans
Dara Shikoh was a Mughal prince, scholar and mystic who sought the common ground of Islam and Hindu thought, and whose Persian translation of the Upanishads carried them, in time, to Europe.
He was born in 1615, the eldest son of the emperor Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, and was expected to succeed him. From his youth he was drawn to the Sufis of the Qadiri order, and later to the Hindu ascetics and scholars of Benares, with whom he spent long hours in conversation.
In 1655 he wrote The Mingling of the Two Oceans, taking its title from a verse of the Qur’an. In it he set the terms of Sufism beside those of Vedanta, the philosophy of the Upanishads, and argued that they describe one truth in different words. Two years later, with the help of pandits in Benares, he completed a Persian translation of some fifty Upanishads, which he called The Greatest Secret. He believed them to be the hidden book of which the Qur’an speaks.
His brother Aurangzeb defeated him in the war of succession that followed their father’s illness. Dara was captured, paraded through Delhi, condemned for apostasy and put to death in 1659.
His book outlived him. A copy of the Persian Upanishads reached the French scholar Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, whose Latin version, the Oupnek’hat, was published in 1801 and 1802. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer kept it by him and called it the consolation of his life. Through such readers the Upanishads entered the thought of Europe and America; see The Golden Chain.
The Order remembers Dara Shikoh as one who heard one voice in two traditions without asking either to give up its own, and who paid for it with his life; see The Poetic Genius, Kabir and Giordano Bruno.