Visitors are bound be enchanted by the new exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
Celebrating art that illustrates the 2,000-year history of Buddhism, “Buddhist Visions” features a collection of more than 80 works of art, each representing a facet of the religion’s rich origins, philosophies and cultural dynamism.
The exhibit, which runs until mid-April, guides museum patrons through the dynamic metamorphosis of Buddhism as new cultures embraced their own local variations on Buddha’s teachings. Viewers will see the transformations in the art’s images as the word of Buddha spread from India to Cambodia and around the globe.
The museum already possessed the majority of the pieces in the show – a hanging scroll of Buddha’s death and a Buddha crafted in marble from the Liao dynasty – though most have not been on display since before the building’s extensive renovation in 2000.
Charles Lachman, the museum’s curator of Asian art, designed the exhibit and felt inspired to find ways to logically demonstrate the museum’s fluid collection and the new acquisitions, he said.
A carved head of Buddha and several Zen ink paintings are among the recent additions to the museum. A stone head of Buddha from the late first century is the oldest piece on display.
Lachman spent more than a year sifting through Buddhist art and developing the exhibit. He challenged himself to present “the diversity of Buddhist art as it has evolved over the past 2,000 years,” he said.
“The physical installation is meant to be open, serene and welcoming.”
The exhibit includes artists who, through their own spirit, envisioned various elements of the religion, including gods and destinations of the afterlife like paradise and hell. Lachman even designed a “Hell Room” where museum goers can further learn about Buddha’s interpretation of hell.

Buddhism originated in 563 B.C., when a young prince by the name of Siddhartha Gautama was born. Though his father wanted him to be crowned king, Siddhartha abandoned his palace and frivolity to seek a more enlightened, spiritual path. Once he attained Nirvana, or freedom from the cycle of reincarnations, Siddhartha “spent the last 40 years of his life expounding upon his insight that suffering and unhappiness are caused by a desire – born of ignorance – for impermanent things that are mistakenly thought to be real,” Lachman explained.
Buddha’s message to adopt and follow a “‘middle way’ between luxury and asceticism” spread throughout Asia, and the pervasive artistic momentum followed, Lachman said.
The global artistic momentum that Buddhism sparked was a driving spiritual force, Lachman said, and continues today with an estimated 500 million Buddha worshippers, who follow the path he charted for them.
Lachman said that though the exhibit’s art is diverse, a spiritual message unites the pieces.
“What most unites this eclectic assemblage,” Lachman said, “perhaps is the fact that virtually all these objects were originally made to serve religious and ritual purposes.”
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