In 2010, the Buddhist Studies & Dialogue Group of the Jesuit Conference Asia Pacific (JCAP) organized its first workshop in Chiangmai, Thailand. This event brought together Jesuit scholars of Buddhism from across Asia, as well as Buddhists interested in dialogue with Christianity, and became the first of a series of annual meetings that have continued until the present. A first collection of essays entitled The Buddha & Jesus was published in 2015, bringing together contributions to the first five conferences. The collection The Wheel & The Cross includes twenty-eight articles from the workshops held between 2015 and 2020. Some of the pieces are more academic in nature; others engage in personal reflection, or outline the history of Buddhist-Christian dialogue in a particular context. The coordinator of the group Fr. In-gun Kang, SJ, notes that the Buddhist wheel of wisdom and the Christian cross of love come together to complement each other, helping practitioners of both Buddhism and Christianity to live together harmoniously. In the words of the preface, all articles in the collection are characterized by a profound rootedness in a particular tradition, as well as by respect for the other and "a quest for genuine understanding" (vii). The volume is also marked by a particular attention to the Buddhist engagement of social and ecological issues, while it also foregrounds the intersection between Ignatian spirituality—a particularly appropriate theme in the Ignatian year of 2021/22—and different forms of Buddhist practice.
