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0323 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1
中央アジア踏査記 : vol.1
On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 / 323 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000214
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

stairs serving for access to the upper grottoes or for com-
munication between them had almost all crumbled away.
Hence many of these shrines high up on the rocks had
become inaccessible. But the disappearance of porches and
verandahs made it easy to see that the interior arrange-
ments and decoration of these upper shrines did not differ
in any essential way from those prevailing in the cave
temples carved into the foot of the cliff.

Access to these offered no difficulty, even though the
fine drift-sand which neglect through centuries had allowed
to accumulate had covered the ground in front and also
the original floor of the entrance, often to a considerable
height. So I could quickly familiarize myself with the
ground-plan and general structural arrangement of these
shrines. They showed much uniformity throughout. From
the oblong antechapel the cave-temple proper was entered
through a high and rather wide passage, which alone
admitted light and air to the interior. This consisted every-
where of a single rectangular cella, usually almost square,
hewn out of the solid rock and provided with a high conical
roof.

Within the cella I found generally a big rectangular
platform decorated with painted stucco. Its centre was
usually occupied by the colossal stucco image of a seated
Buddha, with groups of Bodhisattvas, saintly disciples and
divine attendants on either side (Fig. 81). These varied in
numbers, but were always symmetrically arranged. It was
only too easy to see how much of all this statuary in stucco
had suffered in the course of centuries through the natural
decay of its material, and even more from the hands of
iconoclasts and pious restorers. But in spite of all this