Page 119 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

and, as Sopcr has observed, many of the details arc Indian, or
based on Southeast Asian modifications of the Indian style found
in the kingdom of Champa, with which China was now in con-
tact. But gradually the Indian elements were absorbed, and the
later stone and brick pagodas imitate, in their surface treatment,
the posts, brackets, and projecting roofs of their Chinese timber
prototypes.
At Bamiyan in Afghanistan a high cliff more than a mile in
length had been hollowed out into cave shrines decorated with
frescoes and bracketed at cither end by colossal standing Buddha
figures carved out of the rock, plastered and painted. This fashion
for decorated cave shrines, which had originated in India, spread
to Khotan, Kucha, and other central Asian city-states, where the
already syncretic Graeco-Indian tradition of painting and sculp-
ture became mixed with the flat, heraldic, decorative style of Par-
thia and Sasanian Persia. The routes that skirted the Taklamakan IJ < Mai-du-shin,
che MMMM t.