Book of War), the Ramayana, and the Yoga Vashishta from ancient Sanskrit into Persian, as the Emperor Akbar sought to "form a basis for a united search for truth" and "enable the people to understand the true spirit of their religion".

After his time as a disciple of Mian Mir (witnessing events such as the foundation of the Golden Temple of Amritsar), Dara Shukoh began compiling his spiritual and mystical learnings in a series of books written between 1640 and 1653.

Dara Shukoh's learning caused him to travel across 14,000 km of the Indian subcontinent, searching for mystical knowledge in places such as Ajmer, Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, Varanasi, Kashmir, and Gujarat.

So the Emperor [e.g. Aurangzid], both out of necessity to protect the Holy Law, and also for reasons of State, considered it unlawful to allow Dara to remain alive any longer as a destroyer of the public peace.

[20] When Aurangzeb ascended to the imperial throne, he continued to execute others for political reasons (ex: his brother Murad Baksh and his nephew Sulaiman Shikoh) and persecute denizens of his empire on grounds of heresy, including the beheading of the Armenian Sufi mystic, Sarmad Kashani, for charges of antinomian atheism[21] and the ninth Sikh Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur, for refusing to convert to Islam,[22] making the murder of his brother Dara Shukoh the first in a long line of executions.