Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c13.s2.2

c13.s2.2

room was a large square compartment, its space uninterrupted by any formation of pillars or colonnade. (Plate XLIX, Fig. 1.) Further, the cells opening out from the central hall always contain couches or beds also formed in the rock, and there is often a small recess for use as a locker cut in some convenient position. Owing to the situation of the couch in such small cells, which average only nine feet square, the doorway is not in the centre but to one side of the outer wall. In these rock-cut copies of the structural original it is quite easy to see that the central hall corresponded to the open courtyard, while the facade, vestibule, and cells were all translations, in the rock medium, of the conventional wooden type of viharas, of which owing to their impermanency, no examples have survived.