Around 1888, a group of young Parisian artists from Académie Julian with an enthusiasm for Gauguin, gathered to form a secret mystical society. They called themselves the “Nabis” — Hebrew for “Prophets” — and met every Saturday at Paul-Elie Ranson's studio which they called the “Temple.” The Nabis would expand over the following decade into an art movement, attracting not only other artists from France such as Georges Lacombe, but artists from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark as well. The Nabis' decorative flattened shapes of colors, inspired by the works of Gauguin, opened the door to Abstract Art, thus they be considered among the prophets of Modernism.

Their spiritual and esoteric approach, with frequent themes about world religions, links the Nabis to Symbolism. Paul-Elie Ranson was most interested in philosophy, occultism and religions as illustrated by his Christ and Buddha. The painting shows on one hand Jesus on the cross, surrounded by praying worshipers, and on the other hand, a meditating Buddha surrounded by lotus flowers. The Eastern religion is further enhanced by a representation of Buddha's half face in the top right corner.

Christianity and Buddhism are similar in that they were founded by human beings and named after them. While Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha share similar moral teachings, however, they play very different leading roles as indicated by the opposite meanings of the symbols of the cross and the lotus flower. While Jesus is suffering on the cross, Buddha is sitting in a meditative lotus position.

The horizontal and vertical lines of the cross symbolize space and time respectively. We are all born at a certain time in a certain location and the cross is a symbol of our incarnation to life. The crossing point of the two finite lines represents the infinite and timeless divine center from where life started, from infinity to the finite, and from eternity to mortality. Jesus's crucifixion represents the return to the divine central point from the material cross of time and space.

From a Buddhist perspective, the lotus flower symbolizes the aspiration to purity. In Buddhism, the lotus flower is also an attribute of immortality. While the worshippers around Jesus indicate that Christianity is a faith where God is an outer entity sought communally, the lotus flowers around the meditative Gautama imply that Buddhism is a philosophy of life where the divine is sought inside each individual.

Representing the leading religions of the East and the West in the same artwork, Ranson's painting was unprecedented. Coming from opposite cultures, the Christ and Buddha's global meaning is about the co-existence of the two religions within the spectrum of all spiritual beliefs. Outside the painting, a universal cosmic energy represents the original source from which all religions emanate. This theme will be developed further in the next section in my work Divine Emanations.