"Among collections of Buddhist art, the museum at Nara towers over others as dramatically as its great pagodas dominate the surrounding countryside. This catalogue commemorates a historic exchange of exhibitions between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Nara National Museum that brings the treasures of this collection for the first time to the West. Each of these transcendent objects is discussed in detail by curator Michael Cunningham, and essays by John Rosenfield and Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan brilliantly illuminate their historical and cultural context. Together the authors describe the journey of these works of art through time, from their creation as objects of veneration and spiritual practice, through their decline in the regard of the nationalist culture of the nineteenth century, to their recovery of spiritual authority in the twentieth."--Jacket.