The book compares western and eastern culture, Christianity and Hinduism at a crucial moment in their history – the contemporary one – when both come into a crisis that, as Panikkar writes, “could also not have a way out”, in the hypothesis that each one can find in the other vital elements to renovate and overcome the crisis. The figures chosen by Panikkar as symbols of the two cultures, Kierkegaard and Sankara, not only embody the prototype of Western and Eastern mentality and psychology but also live in times of religious decadence and try to crave for the absolute truth.