A current joke tells of a middle-aged Jewish woman who treks to the Himalayas to seek an audience with a guru sitting in seclusion on a mountaintop. When at last she comes before him, she implores: "Sheldon, come home!"

Rosie Rosenzweig is that woman—but in real life, the story has a different ending. Instead of asking her Buddhist son, Ben, to come home, Rosie accepts his invitation to learn about Buddhism firsthand. Together they visit retreat centers around the world and meet leading meditation masters who are Ben's gurus: Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and Tibetan lamas Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche. While struggling to come to terms with Ben's choice of a spiritual path so different from everything that she cherishes, Rosie finds that she is learning more about herself than she anticipated.

The adventures Rosie recounts take her from the suburbs of Boston to a Zen hermitage in France, an enclave of Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal, and finally to her own spiritual home in Jerusalem. Whether she is learning to practice mindfulness meditation, sharing a cup of tea with a Zen master, or worried about bowing down to idols, Rosie is intent in her quest to find common ground between two ancient traditions, to make peace with her son, and to find a way to her own authentic experience of truth.