Tibetan art can be a challenge for non-initiates to decipher. The paintings on display at the Rubin are densely packed with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, teachers, offerings, and entourages of deities both benevolent and wrathful. But once you pierce through the iconography, the underlying structure remains remarkably consistent: a central deity or adept poses atop a lotus throne, with his teachers above, an entourage around the center, and mystical protectors toward the bottom. There are many variations of this scheme, from the orange flames that mark black-background paintings of wrathful deities, to the postures, hand gestures, and consorts that attend the many, many tantric practitioners celebrated by Tibetans—but this central structure remains legible.

When Lobsang Gyatso installed himself, with Qoshot Mongol support, as the Fifth Dalai Lama in 1642, he commissioned works in these traditional formats to secure his legitimacy. In one particularly striking example the Dalai Lama, framed by golden prints of his hands and feet, meditates below his previous incarnations, who include both the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara and Songtsen Gampo, founder of the first Tibetan empire. This painting and others around it employ all the conventions of religious art for expressly profane ends, establishing both sacral power and political legitimacy and explicitly aligning the upstart ruler with an aristocratic legacy. Religion, power, and magic all mingle on a single plane. Lobsang and his government spread this message far and wide via woodblock prints and polemics, many of them written by the Dalai Lama himself. Lobsang built a new palace on the hill where Gampo’s had once stood and named it Potala, after the mountain home of Avalokiteshvara. And he employed the magic of deities like Vajrabhairava to demolish his political enemies.

Other powers, like the fractured Mongols, found in Tibetan Buddhism the cure for their own decline. Backed into one niche is a staggering gilt-bronze statue of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. Sculpted by the seventeenth-century artist and monk Zanabazar, this statue is all lithe curves and supple gestures. It was cast for an annual festival in celebration of Maitreya, whose arrival many Mongols believed would herald both a Buddhist golden age and a return to the heights of the Mongol Empire.

This expectation reached a new pitch of intensity under the Qing emperors. Reacting to revolts from Christian and Muslim groups, as well as invasions from northern India, the Manchu spread the legend of Shambhala, an end-times city hidden deep in the Himalayas from which miraculous legions would emerge to vanquish the enemies of Buddhism. Eager to be reborn in Shambhala and so help usher in this imminent golden age, many Mongol notables built temples specially dedicated to the apocalypse. Paintings on their walls depicted the legendary city as a paradise tucked away within concentric rings of sky-high mountains. The city opened only to admit a miraculous host of men, animals, and fearsome spirits onto a vast and grisly battlefield, where, blessed by cloud-borne deities and Bodhisattvas, they would eliminate the enemies of Buddhism for all time.

A sort of apocalypse did eventually come, but not the kind they were expecting. In the 1930s, Mongolian Communists, with support from the Soviet Union, waged a campaign of terror against “reactionary elements,” killing over 17,000 lamas and destroying hundreds of temples. The few surviving structures functioned as Potemkin Potalas, on view for foreign dignitaries in a country where all religion had been violently suppressed. A visitor to modern Ulaanbaatar will find few outward signs of the city’s illustrious religious past, and you have to wander through blocks of cracking Soviet concrete to find them. A few objects are housed in buildings that survived as monuments to barbarism, like the divination swords and shamanic masks that rest in the chilly confines of the Choijin Lama’s former temple. Monks brush across the grounds of the Ganden Monastery, in whose central cinderblock temple worshippers spin prayer wheels as they circumambulate an eighty-two-foot Avalokiteshvara. Down the scalloped mud road, shamans conduct their rituals in a small group of “gers” (the Mongolian word for yurts).

Since the official recognition of religious freedom in 1990, close to two hundred temples, operated by several hundred monks and nuns, have reopened throughout Mongolia. The rebound has been slow, in part because Buddhism has lost its established status. Its return has been financed by neither tax levies nor a Khan’s largesse. This is probably not something to lament.

The march of time on display in this exhibit does make you wonder about the fragility of our own social order, and religion’s place in it. After centuries of working in concert with religion, empire turned against faith in Mongolia and Tibet—and came close to exterminating it. Removed from the public square, Buddhism lived on in the continued private religious practice of regular Mongolians, whose beliefs defied the government’s rigid dogma. Perhaps that is also how faith will survive in an increasingly secularized West—private if not secret, stripped of the imperial prerogatives it once enjoyed, no longer tempted by the fruits of domination.