BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION : Spiritual Truths of Judaism and Buddhism Meet : THE JEW IN THE LOTUS: A Jewish Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India, by <i> Rodger Kamenetz</i> (Harper San Francisco, $20, 304 pages)

“The jewel in the lotus” is a metaphorical image evoked in certain Buddhist chants, but the phrase turns into a comic but faintly discordant pun in the title of Rodger Kamenetz’s book, “The Jew in the Lotus,” a bit of wordplay intended to conjure up a dramatic but sometimes disturbing encounter between Judaism and Buddhism.

At the heart of the book is an account of a 1990 convocation that brought together the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and an unlikely collection of Jewish rabbis and scholars who called on him at his place of exile in India.

“Tell me your secret,” asked the Dalai Lama, whose people are at risk of “a slow-motion genocide” under Chinese occupation, “the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.”

As we soon see, the Dalai Lama’s question rings with irony, and the real subject of Kamenetz’s book turns out to be the crisis of spirituality in contemporary Judaism.

He describes the fracturing of the Jewish world into factions ranging from the ultra-Orthodox to wholly secular, a veritable “war of denominations” that threatens the very existence of Judaism.

“For the Orthodox,” Kamenetz writes of his fellow Jewish travelers on the road to the Dalai Lama, “interfaith meant praying with Reform or Reconstructionist Jews.”

There’s irony, too, in the fact that the spiritual crisis in Judaism has prompted some Jews to undertake Buddhist practice--Kamenetz calls them Jewish Buddhists, or “JUBUs,” restless spiritual seekers who aspire to find both “Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.”

So the journey to the dharmsala and the encounter with the Dalai Lama become the occasion for a wide-ranging excursion into history and religion, Jewish identity and Jewish destiny.

The Dalai Lama, for example, queried his callers on the Jewish mystical tradition of cabala. And so we are treated to a spirited dialogue between the Dalai Lama and one of the Jewish emissaries on the subject of angels. All the while, some of the other rabbis watch in bemusement or outright disdain.

“Repression of angels had been going on for centuries,” Kamenetz writes, “but somehow the Dalai Lama had cracked it open and released them.”

Indeed, the most telling aspects of “The Jew in the Lotus” are the little debates that constantly flare up within the Jewish delegation. Would the Orthodox members of the parties join in eating local vegetarian dishes? Was it acceptable under strict observance of Jewish law to call the Dalai Lama “His Holiness”?

Kamenetz cannot fail to respond to the vast scale of the religious tapestry that surrounded them, the astounding profusion of religions that bespeak the human impulse toward faith in an almighty power. “One moon, many pools” is a Buddhist aphorism that sums up the kind of ecumenicalism that allows Kamenetz to see all of the world’s religions as the worship of a single divine truth.

“On Route One, the whole grand story of Jewish survival, the tremendous importance I attach to my history, my Torah, shrank in perspective,” Kamenetz writes of the journey along one of India’s teeming highways. “In the middle of India, did it really make any difference that we were Jews?”

The real lesson of Kamenetz’s book, however, is much harsher. Even as Kamenetz writes longingly of “a spiritual ecology,” he constantly reminds us of the hard edge of religious orthodoxy.

And so, even at the most optimistic moments in Kamenetz’s book, I was mindful of the worst excesses of true belief: the death sentence on Salman Rushdie, the shootings at abortion clinics in Brookline, the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the most recent bombings outside Tel Aviv.