Intended to inspire the devout and provide a focus for religious practice, Buddhist artworks stand at the center of a great religious tradition that swept across Asia during the first millennia. How to Read Buddhist Art assembles fifty-four masterpieces from The Met collection to explore how images of the Buddha crossed linguistic and cultural barriers, and how they took on different (yet remarkably consistent) characteristics in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Works highlighted in this rich, concise overview include reliquaries, images of the Buddha that attempt to capture his transcendence, diverse bodhisattvas who protect and help the devout on their personal path, and representations of important teachers. The book offers the essential iconographic frameworks needed to understand Buddhist art and practice, helping the reader to appreciate how artists gave form to subtle aspects of the teachings, especially in the sublime expression of the Buddha himself.

As Buddhism spread out from north India, the place of its origin in the sixth century BC, the core ideas of this great religious tradition were often expressed through images. This Bulletin and the exhibition it accompanies, "Tibet and India: Buddhist Traditions and Transformations," focus on Indian and Tibetan Buddhist art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a period that witnessed both the end of the rich north Indian Buddhist tradition and the beginning of popular Buddhist practice in Tibet. At this critical juncture in Buddhist history, a number of Tibetan monks traveled down out of the Himalayas to study at the famed monasteries of north India, where many also set about translating the vast corpus of Buddhist texts. As they visited these centers of scholarship and the pilgrimage sites associated with the Buddha's life, the monks encountered refined works of art—from complex stone carvings to delicately illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts—made by workshops that had been active for more than 1,400 years. These profound works of religious art and the Tibetan images that followed them help shed light on how the Tibetans received and transformed the north Indian image-making tradition.

A pioneering study of the emergence of Buddhist art in southern India, featuring vibrant photography of rare works, many published here for the first time Named for two primary motifs in Buddhist art, the sacred bodhi tree and the protective snake, Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India is the first publication to foreground devotional works produced in the Deccan from 200 BCE to 400 CE. Unlike traditional narratives, which focus on northern India (where the Buddha was born, taught, and died), this groundbreaking book presents Buddhist art from monastic sites in the south. Long neglected, this is among the earliest surviving bodies of Buddhist art, and among the most sublimely beautiful. An international team of researchers contributes new scholarship on the sculptural and devotional art associated with Buddhism, and masterpieces from recently excavated Buddhist sites are published here for the first time—including Kanaganahalli and Phanigiri, the most important new discoveries in a generation. With its exploration of Buddhism’s emergence in southern India, as well as of India’s deep commercial and cultural engagement with the Hellenized and Roman worlds, this definitive study expands our understanding of the origins of Buddhist art itself.

Explores Tibetan mandalas from their ancient origins to the present day, providing a contemporary perspective on a centuries-old Buddhist model of the universe.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a long tradition of presenting exhibitions that advance our understanding of the art of the ancient world. "Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eight Century" will open up new vistas for our visitors, introducing the little-known sculptural traditions of Southeast Asia. This region was described by early geographers as the place "beyond India, before China"—a region seemingly without an identity of its own. As this exhibition ably demonstrates, in the course of the first millennium, mainland and insular Southeast Asia boasted a string of emerging states, whose identities have largely been lost to modern history. The principal kingdoms that produced the sculptures presented here—Pyu, Funan, Zhenla, Champa, Dvāravatī, Śrīvijaya—are unfamiliar, if not unknown, to many. Yet these early states represent the beginning of state formation in Southeast Asia, and their archaeological footprints broadly define the political map of the region today. The surviving corpus of early religious art from these kingdoms, much of it spectacular in scale and often sublimely beautiful, is our principal window onto these cultures.

The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Chinese Buddhist and Daoist sculpture is the largest in the western world. In this lavish, comprehensive volume, archaeological discoveries and scientific testing and analysis serve as the basis for a reassessment of 120 works ranging in date from the fourth to the twentieth century, many of them previously unpublished and all of them newly and beautifully photographed. An introductory essay provides an indispensable overview of Buddhist practices and iconography—acquainting us with the panoply of past, present, and future Buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks and arhats, guardians and adepts, pilgrims and immortals—and explores the fascinating dialogue between Indian and Chinese culture that underlies the transmission of Buddhism into China. In addition to detailed individual discussions of fifty masterpieces—a heterogeneous group including portable shrines carved in wood, elegant bronze icons, monumental stone representations, colorful glazed-ceramic figures, and more—the catalogue presents a ground-breaking survey of the methods used in crafting the sculptures. A second introductory essay and several technical appendices address the question of how early Chinese bronzes, as opposed to those from Gandhara and other westerly regions, were cast; the construction methods used for wood sculptures in China, notably different from those used in Japan; the complex layers of color and gilding on works in all media and their possible significance; and the role of consecratory deposits in wood and metal sculptures. A final appendix publishes the results of an intensive analysis of the wood material in the collection, classifying every sculpture by the genus of its wood and including a section of photomicrographs of each wood sample—an invaluable resource for researchers continuing to study works of this genre. As illuminating for new enthusiasts of Chinese Buddhist art as for scholars and connoisseurs, Wisdom Embodied is a glorious tour of the Metropolitan's unparalleled collection, certain to ear its place as a classic in the field.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its purpose is to publish original research on works in the Museum’s collection. Articles are contributed by members of the Museum staff and other art historians and specialists.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 55 include an essay on Buddhist imagery in a medieval Chinese silk painted banner, a discussion of a rare 19th-century keyed guitar, and a contextualization of Ed Ruscha’s books of photographs of L.A. streets and gas stations of the 1960s and ’70s.