Some big gods appear in a small form in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-Leaf Tradition.” Unlike contemporaneous Islamic art, which generally abhorred the depiction of any living thing, let alone a deity, the indigenous traditions of India, Nepal, and Tibet saw nothing at all amiss in placing their idols on a surface scarcely larger than a postage stamp.

But Prince Hamlet once famously opined that “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space,” and so it is that the sundry eminences depicted in this new exhibition seem fully happy to find themselves immortalized on the trimmed leaves of a palm tree.

Most of the works on view are the pages, or literally the leaves, of a religious text, the Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra, whose title is translated by the curators as the Perfection of Wisdom. Also included are the wooden covers of these texts as well as a number of sculptures on related themes. The majority of the works date from the 11th century, give or take a few decades. The depictions of Green Tara holding a blue lotus, or Mahakali with a knife and a skull, or the six-armed Avalokitesvara, range from swift, tentative and schematic renderings to works of great, if diminutive, precision, with lapidary, bejeweled surfaces. Not the least part of their historical importance is that, because of the highly perishable nature of Indian paintings from this period, much of what survives at all survives on these palm leaves, affording us a vivid sense of all that has been lost.

But perhaps the single most striking element of the works in question is their use of calligraphy. Many of them are written in the Bengali script, which derives from the Devanagari script that is used in writing Sanskrit and Hindi. In both writing systems, there are effectively no divisions between the words, which create a delightful effect of pure blocks of text that dazzle even the eyes of people who couldn’t decipher a single letter of them. In this respect, these regimented rows upon rows of text resemble the dream squiggles that show up so illogically in the works of Miró, Masson, and other Surrealists. In the midst of these sere and seemingly relentless passages of inscrutable glyphs, in the very center of the palm frond, an oasis of color, of recognizable form is visible in the depictions of divinity, as though metaphysically elevated beyond the reach of the text.

If the truth be told, the works on view in this exhibition are so far removed from the interests of the average visitor to the Metropolitan that it is a little bit daunting to be presented with so direct and vivid and insurmountable a sense of the limitations of one’s knowledge. This is in part the cause and consequence of the unfortunate fact that the Asian art collections at the Met are among the least visited in the museum. A hieratic serenity seems to haunt the galleries, which is a nice way of saying that they are often deserted. You have none of the hordes you find among, say, the Impressionists in the 19th-century wing. Part of the problem for most viewers is not quite knowing how to approach the objects. Ideally, of course, one would know something about them: But the important thing to remember is that, even if you don’t, you can still have a very rewarding experience by surrendering to the pure visual power of the work.

It is a further testament to the universality and the excellence of the Metropolitan Museum’s collections as a whole that this show has been assembled only from works in its permanent collection. Apparently, such palm-leaf manuscripts are extremely rare, and few of them have survived, mostly in the monasteries of Tibet. But for now, they are splendidly displayed on the Upper East Side.

Through March 22 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).