A pair of standing sandstone figures, or bodhisattvas, greets viewers at the Asia Society Museum’s entrance to “Images of the Divine: South and Southeast Asian Sculpture.” As soon as I saw the life-size royal couple, a serene male and female from early 13th-century Cambodia, my heart quickened. I felt wonderfully at ease, as if I had stepped into a sanctuary.

“Images of the Divine” includes more than 50 Hindu and Buddhist sculptures from such places as India, Tibet, Pakistan, Thailand, and Indonesia. The works range in period from the first to the 17th century, and in materials from sandstone, limestone, phyllite, and stucco to copper, silver, gold, and semiprecious stones. Yet all feel familial. It is not as if they all seem to have come from the same hand; rather, they seem to have come from the same mystical place, the same desire to convey, or distill, similar religious experience. They share much more in common stylistically than they lack, and their effect builds exponentially from the first sculpture to the last.

The beautifully arranged show is divided into three sections (“Bodhisattvas,” “Buddhas,” and “Hindu Gods and Goddesses”). The two 13th-century sandstone bodhisattvas kick off both the exhibition and their section, and they make excellent emissaries for the rest of the show. Standing together but not quite touching, heads tilted slightly downward, eyes closed, smiling as if in prayer, the couple occupies its own private universe – a blissful, dreamy, inward space. It appears to resonate languidly outward, and at times opens to offer its mysteries to us.

The royal couple, which may allude to deities, are full of religious drama. Yet they have none of the human presence or self-awareness experienced in Greek or Renaissance art. Spiritual distillations, they are not concerned with the gravity and weight of being human. Like ancient Egyptian funerary art, they are frontal, erect, and formal. They exude a buoyant, otherworldly calm. The sculptures – weightless, lithe, and serpentine – do not live here among us but are merely floating through. They appear to titillate, entice, awe, and amaze us. Yet they remain humble and at a distance. Having reached enlightenment, their strength is in their reserve.

Many of the sculptures in “Images of the Divine” are masterpieces. As foreign or old as they are, the sculptures may feel familiar not only because they get at the timeless essentials of art but also because we live with their heirs – the erotically sleek, pared-down forms in the sculptures of Elie Nadelman, Jean Arp, and Constantin Brancusi. I could feel here the same kind of Modernist desire to whittle down form to essentials – as if the spiritual aims of Modernist abstraction had already been brought to fruition as early as the third century. It makes sense that Nadelman, who coined the term “significant form,” was heavily drawn to the sleek lines and sublime theatricality of Hindu sculptures.

A number of the figures in the show feel as if their essential movements could be seen in the simple terms of an abstract “S” curve. Walking through the show, in which one sculpture’s arabesque whiplashes into the next sculpture’s arabesque, it becomes clear just how truly beautiful and clear a metaphor for the infinite the curve really is. Two magnificent copper-alloy sculptures, both from the 11th century, are even more magnificent together. In one, the goddess Parvati’s swaying hips flow to the right; in the other, Rama’s hips sway to the left. They can be seen near each other in the exhibition, and look as if they are answering each other’s movements or dancing together.

In the limestone “Buddha” (c. 8th century), the eyes are distilled into birds, perched upon his face; in the copper-alloy “Buddha” (late sixth century), the figure’s robe is so smooth and tightly wrapped that figure and robe, body and air, become indistinguishable. The sculpture feels paradoxically ghostlike, almost transparent. In the copper alloy “Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Shiva Nataraja)” (c. 970), the god’s dance of bliss (which will lead through destruction to creation) is felt, as in Egyptian figures, primarily in the tension between frontal and profile views. The god is simultaneously supported and trapped by his fiery halo, which radiates from his head like rays of the sun but against which he pulls as if caught in his own web.

The forms in the sandstone “Head of Vishnu” (seventh-eighth century) swell as if they were breathing; the sculpture’s gorgeous lines, as curvy and undulating as they are hard and defined, create an equilibrium between opposing forces. At their center Vishnu’s lips soften and droop into a thickened pout that suggests sadness, yet they rise into seductively sly smiles at their ends.

In the extravagantly ornate, almost baroque, gilt copper-alloy “Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in the Form of Amoghapasha Lokeshvara” (16th-17th century), the large moves – the undulating curves, smooth surfaces, and sense of rest and quietude – hold the sculpture together. Yet in the seated, gilt copper, and semiprecious stone “Bodhisattva” (13th century) everything comes down, through the rocking of the hips and the twist of the torso, to a small detail: a hand that, held up in a gesture of reassurance, flutters like the beginnings of life in the stillness.

The greatest figures in this fabulous show reach an equipoise between spiritual reverie and unyielding solidity, between the natural and unpretentious qualities of vines, flowers, and polished stones, and the most intricate and lofty mythologies. This combination of the sacred and profane gives each figure the lightness of a balloon and grandeur of a temple. In “Images of the Divine,” as in most art, it all seems to come down to the majesty, grace, humility, and power that can only be achieved through refinement.

Until September 18 (725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, 212-288-6400).