These meditations are based on a little book I wrote for myself during 1986-87, not long after we had moved to the tantric Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.
I was teaching there, high in the Himalayas, in a primitive and impoverished elementary school. That first year my husband and l were the only Quakers present. We worshipped with a group of evangelical Christian missionaries. I did not question the reality of their own inward experience of what they called Jesus Christ, but I found I could not accept their theologies or concepts of salvation. I could not accept that the gentle Buddhists around me were condemned to eternal torture because they did not affirm "Jesus Christ as their personal saviour." Indeed, I found much in the Bhutanese compassionate concern for all creatures, and in the teachings of their Lord Buddha, that for me confirmed the way of Jesus.
So I turned to the gospels and the words of Jesus himself for the affirmation of what, by now, I knew experientially to be the rocks upon which my own life could be built: the reality of this inward kingdom and the way of which he spoke. His words did not become a barrier between myself and the Buddhist friends I so much loved; but rather, they became a bridge between the fundamental truths in their experience and in my own.
