"Richard Lannoy, the most scintillating interpreter of Indian culture to date, writes: At first sight it is the genial “Buddhist humanism” which strikes the visitor Itothe fresco caves]. Yet these reassuringly human scenes are not quite what they seem to be. For one thing, even the best preserved are exceedingly elusive to “read”; one must make an appreciable effort to slow down one's reading of their visual language in order to perceive the spatial and tactile relations established between the figures. There is no recession - all advance towards the eye, looming from a strange undifferentiated source to wrap around the viewer. This is not an optical illusion of cave-light; on close examination it will be found to result from a controlled use of almost equal tones in the variation of local colour. A patch of green, say, juxtaposed to a patch of red, is of very nearly the same tonality when photographed in monochrome. Because of this tonal equality one is constantly discovering new figures which were unseen through the deliberately unaccented or “suppressed” tonality of detail, and the tempo of this slow discovery is very precisely calculated. Every figure has a counterfigure, every body an anti-body. Each figure is inseparable from its environment. The optical basis of this technique is very simple and is frequently used by Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse to obtain a hallucinating, visionary effect; the later, psychedelic poster artists made a trick of it. One can assume that the Ajanta painters discovered the effect under similar lighting conditions. There is one vital difference, however; at Ajanta there is no source of light in the caves, a fact which says much about the metaphysic of the cave sanctuaries. Objects are their own light when experienced by all the senses in harmony, and such harmony was the goal of the cave ritual. When viewed by flickering light, as was intended, only' fragmentary glimpses of the colours and lines of the objects depicted can be obtained. A body undulates towards the eye from an indistinguishable blur; moments (perhaps minutes) later, a second body wells out of the blur and is seen to be intertwined with the first. The viewer is so involved in this optical assimilation that his relation to the other figure only proceeds gradually from the tactile to the emotional recognition of its significance. It cannot be reduced to verbal interpretation, as it is pure tactile sensation."