The Ground We Share

Download or read book The Ground We Share written by Robert Aitken and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1996-06-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These dialogues between Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the first American-born Zen masters, and Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Roman Catholic monk and hermit, took place during a week-long retreat the two old friends undertook in 1991 in a remote part of the island of Hawaii. Their aim was to approach the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity in a fresh way, one that takes as its starting point a comparison of the personal experiences of the dialoguers—as a Buddhist and as a Christian, respectively—rather than abstract concepts. The result is the discovery of a surprising amount of common ground—the kind of shared experience that forms a solid foundation for further dialogue.