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78 : Śramaņa, Vol 66, No. 2, April-June 2015 truth, consciousness and bliss, he quotes with approval Bhagavadgita?!.."The senses are high, so they say. Higher than the senses is the mind; higher than the mind is thought; while higher than thought is He (the soul)."22 This is the spiritual fullness which Yaśovijaya has told us. It is the outcome of the exercise of neutrality and groundedness in all view-points. Both the Adhyātmasāra and the Adhyātmopanişat-prakaraņa, we can note, are sprinkled with references to the Bhagavadgitā and the Upanişads. Yaśovijaya and Dara Shukoh: A Cosmopolitan Ideal in 17th Century India
With this synopsis of the development of Yaśovijaya's thought, let me return to the political context in which he lived and in particular to the religious cosmopolitanism of Dara Shukoh (1615-1659). It was in 1655 or 1656, at just the time when Yaśovijaya would have been finishing up his studies in Varanasi, that Dara Shukoh himself assembled in Varanasi with a team of the most renowned Sanskrit pandits to help him execute his plan of translating the Hindu scriptures, or at least those of them that were “hermeneutically continuous” with the Quran. He was to supervise the translation into Persian of fifty-two Upanişads, of the Yogavāsistha and of the Bhagavadgitā, all of which, he believed could be read as speaking of the divine unity, if one mapped their terminology into that of Sufism in accordance with the notational isomorphisms he had already established, in a book entitled The Meeting-Place of the Two Oceans (Majma-ul-Barhain), the title indicative of a conception of Hinduism and Islam as coming together at a point of confluence. A translation into Sanskrit, possibly made by Dara Shukoh himself, is entitled Samudra-sangama. In the ‘Preface' to his translation of the Upanişads, Dara Shukoh tells us that “As at this period the city of Benares, which is the centre of the sciences of this community, was in certain relations with this seeker of the Truth (sc. Dara Sukoh], he assembled together the Pandits and Sarnyāsīs who were the most learned of their time and proficient in the Upanekhat, he himself being free from all materialistic motives, translated the essential
