Talking about cave temples, one will naturally recall those of India such as Ajanta and Ellora. Their technique was introduced to China (Tun-huang, Yun-kang and others) along with Buddhism. Compared with Indian cave temples, Chinese ones have many more wall and ceiling paintings, though these are not so characteristic from the architectural point of view. In Pakistan, cave temples are few, but in Afghanistan, we can find interesting western style carved ceilings in dome and laternendecke at Bamiyan etc.

The cave temples in India have no superior in the world in their magnificent carvings and architectural formality, with pillars and beams in order. In contrast to that, the wooden buildings of the ancient times were almost lost, still ca. 1,200 ancient cave temples exist mainly in the Decan Plateau, because they are carved buildings in the strong rocky mountains. About 75 percent of them belong to Buddhism, and it has been considered that they inform us about the figure and construction as replicas of freestanding wooden monasteries and chapels in those times.

A Hindu temple is fundamentally a "House of God," but the Buddhist caves are a combination of "Vihara" caves where priests lived and "Chaitya" caves as chapels enshrining "Stupa." Those caves follow the same manner of the monasteries and chaitya halls built by wood or brick on the ground. We can see the plans of wooden temples by excavated foundations, but the upper building structure is not clear. Therefore, the ancient wooden architecture was to be analogized from the figure of cave temples.

In fact, Indian cave temples seem to follow the wooden structure in details, and the art and architectural historians like Percy Brown took it for granted that the ancient wooden temples were built as just the same figures as cave temples.