A Confluence of Traditions: The Jūg Bāsisht Revisited

With the pieces provided by the previous chapters in place, chapter five ushers a return to the Persian Jūg Bāsisht. Translating specific passages of the original Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha alongside the corresponding passages in the Jūg Bāsisht, this chapter illustrates how the translation team drew upon the various slices of the Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian traditions examined in Chapters 1-4 in order to craft their Persian rendition of the text. The Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha’s particular metaphysics, alongside Madhusūdana’s specific interpretations of it; Muḥibb Allāh’s Islamic metaphysics and framework for conceptualizing religious diversity, alongside Findiriskī’s exegesis of the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, provide important philosophical resources for the translation team. The translators, in turn, creatively utilized these philosophical resources throughout the Jūg Bāsisht in order to render Hindu Sanskrit thought within the language of Persian Islamic philosophy. In this fashion, this chapter reconstructs both the approach and the implicit theory of translation deployed by the Jūg Bāsisht’s translation team.