"Jesus and Buddha were teachers of a world-subverting wisdom that undermined and challenged conventional ways of seeing and being. Their subversive wisdom was also an alternative wisdom; they taught a way or path of transformation," writes editor Marcus Borg. Although these two ethical teachers were separated by 500 years, 3000 miles, and two very different cultures, they had similar messages about love, material wealth, compassion, temptation, inner life, salvation, discipleship, and the future. These parallels are set side-by-side on facing pages in this enlightening book.

Marcus Borg (The God We Never Knew), as a Jesus scholar and a devoted but non-exclusivist Christian, notes: "The path of which they both speak is a path of liberation from our anxious grasping, resurrection into a new way of being, and transformation into the compassionate life." His notes throughout the book provide just the right setting for reflection on the correspondences between the lives and teachings of Jesus and Buddha. Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist scholar and the author of A Path with Heart, also affirms "the brotherhood of true sacred physicians, healers of the sorrows of humanity."

Both Borg and Kornfield are exemplars of the spiritual practice of hospitality in this age of religious pluralism. This wonderful and enlightening book builds bridges very much needed in the twenty-first century.