Dr. Robert Elinor is a Presbyterian minister who has taught religious studies for 40 years at various universities. He believes that "visual images not only express religious experience immediately, they often convey religious meaning more clearly and completely than words." This impressive volume brings images of Buddha and Christ together in one volume. Here is a wonderful opportunity to ponder the similarities and differences between two religions "that find the locus of universal truth embodied in a particular person."
Dr. Elinor has ranged all over Europe, Asia, and America to come up with 120 images of Buddhist and Christian iconography. Although the imperturbable Buddha and the suffering Christ are most recognizable, the reader will find many other images here from various periods in history. Elinor notes that each era seems to fashion its understandings of these Lords of East and West according to their own insights, hopes, and fears.
I agree with the author that a long look at these images helps us appreciate "two masks of one transcendent mystery." Or as Elinor concludes: "We sense in all the great images of Buddha and Christ, however, something of the same self-emptying love at the heart of the sacred. Such disparate forms as the Gupta Buddha and the Byzantine Christ have as their common denominator the power to evoke this liberating, numinous experience."
