Kanishka

Kanishka I was the most powerful ruler of the Kushan Empire, which under him stretched from Central Asia across Gandhara and deep into the plains of northern India in the second century CE. Remembered in Buddhist tradition as a great royal patron, he helped make Gandhara a centre from which Buddhism and its art spread along the Silk Road towards China.

Kanishka's dates have long been argued over. Older scholarship placed his accession in 78 CE and linked it to the start of the Saka calendar era, but historians have abandoned that view; the scholar Falk puts his accession around 127, and his reign is now usually given as about 127 to 150. Nothing reliable is known of his birth or death.

The Rabatak inscription, a genealogy carved in Bactrian, settles his ancestry: it names Kujula Kadphises, founder of the dynasty, as his great-grandfather, Vima Taktu as his grandfather and Vima Kadphises, his predecessor, as his father. He was of Yuezhi descent, and his native tongue may have been a Tocharian language. Older theories that Kanishka came from Khotan or Kashmir and founded a separate line rested on later traditions.

His realm ran from the lands north of the Oxus, in today's Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, to Mathura in northern India. The Rabatak inscription even claims cities further east, including Pataliputra, and a later Buddhist text speaks of his conquering it. His main capital was Purushapura, modern Peshawar in Pakistan, with Mathura as a second centre, and a town in Kashmir was named after him. His grip on the Tarim Basin is less certain: coins of his reign have been found there, but the area was largely under Chinese influence. A single Chinese translation of a lost Sanskrit text tells of his repelling a Parthian invasion.

According to the Rabatak inscription, Kanishka replaced Greek with Bactrian, an Iranian language, as the language of government, around the start of his reign. His coins show the change: early issues carry Greek legends and Greek gods such as Helios and Selene, while later ones use Bactrian, still written in Greek letters with an extra sign for the "sh" sound, alongside Iranian deities like Mithra and Nana, the Hindu god Shiva, and, on under one per cent of the coins, the Buddha. He usually appears as a bearded figure in a long coat and trousers, sacrificing at a small altar.

Buddhist writers made Kanishka a model king, telling how a harsh ruler was won over to the faith, and how the Buddha himself had foretold his great stupa. The variety of gods on his coins points to wide religious syncretism, and modern accounts hold that he never formally converted, but his patronage is not in doubt. Tradition credits him with convening a Buddhist council in Kashmir, and the scholar-poet Ashvaghosha is said to have been close to him.

His most famous monument was the great stupa outside Peshawar. Excavators who found its base in 1908 and 1909 estimated a diameter of about 87 metres, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, visiting around 630, described a tower of immense height. A relic casket found in the foundations bears his name, though some scholars now attribute it to his successor. Both the Graeco-Buddhist art of Gandhara and the art of Mathura flourished under his rule.

Kanishka was probably followed by Huvishka, though how and when remains unclear. In the decades after his reign, Kushan monks such as Lokaksema, active around 178 in Luoyang, translated Mahayana scriptures into Chinese, part of the movement his patronage had encouraged.

Our 100 and 200 maps bracket his reign, showing the Kushan Empire between the Parthian Empire to the west and the Han dynasty to the east.