Where Buddha and Jesus Meet

The Raft Is Not the Shore:

Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness

By Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan

Orbis Books, 153 pp.

Jesus and Buddha:

The Parallel Sayings

Edited by Marcus Borg

Introduction by Jack Kornfield

Seastone, 241 pp.

Jesus and Lao Tzu:

The Parallel Sayings

Edited by Martin Aronson

Introduction by David Steindl-Rast

Seastone, 210 pp.

Buddha and Christ: Images of Wholeness

By Robert Elinor

Weatherhill, 223 pp.

Interreligious dialogue is a fact of our times, whether we are actually engaged in meeting with people of other faiths, or are simply trying to make sense of the world's variety of relgious traditions in our own minds. Many of us are wondering whether our differences divide us, or whether they perhaps actually create a need for the wisdom of one another's traditions. But how can you tell when a fruitful search for understanding gives way to a shallow borrowing of half-understood ideas and rituals from another religion?

Books on the world's religions abound, but which ones offer real guidance and insight? The following four books represent three very different ways of approaching the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism, from the chance to be a fly on the wall as Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan speak from their hearts, to a comparison of the words of the founding figures, to a kind of visual conversation among images of the Buddha and of Christ. Together, these four books negotiate the narrow path that respects religious differences while reaching for a common understanding of both humanity and transcendence.

The republication, after 25 years, of "The Raft Is Not the Shore" is cause for celebration. It is a classic work of interfaith reflection on the role of religious people in the shaping of a just and compassionate world. The book came into existence over a period of weeks during the late winter in a suburb of Paris, where Daniel Berrigan, the American Catholic priest, had gone to recover his equanimity after release from an American prison where he had been held for his active resistance to the Vietnam War.

Every evening, Father Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh prayed together in silence, "for the space of a candle."

In Paris, Berrigan met Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who shared Berrigan's spiritually based political commitments as well as his love of poetry. "Each morning I would pack a few books and walk to the magnificent Parc de Sceaux, there to spend the day reading, meditating, writing," Berrigan writes of the days he spent getting to know Nhat Hanh. "Every evening we prayed together in silence, 'for the space of a candle,' at Nhat Hanh's gentle leading."

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