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The discoveries of Stein, Pelliot and others have shown that this influence extended across Central Asia to China and one of the most important turns in the fortunes of Buddhism was its association with a Central Asian tribe analogous to the Turks and called Kushans or Yüeh-chih, whose territories lay without as well as within the frontiers of modern India and who borrowed much of their culture from Persia and some from the Greeks.
Here Kadphises, the chief of one of their tribes, called the Kushans, succeeded in imposing his authority on the others who coalesced into one nation henceforth known by the tribal name.
Asanga was alleged to have received revelations from Maitreya and five of his works are attributed to this Bodhisattva who enjoyed considerable honour at this period. It may be that the veneration for the Buddha of the future, the Messiah who would reign over his saints in a pure land, owed something to Persian influence which was strong in India during the decadence of the Kushans.
Asanga was the founder of the later and more scholastic system called Yogâcâra and is also associated with a series of revelations said to have been made by Maitreya. As mentioned above, tradition makes Aśvaghosha, one of the most brilliant among Sanskrit writers, live at the court of Kanishka and according to some accounts he was given to the Kushans as part of a war indemnity.
But the Kushans, or Yueh Chis, during the various stages of their slow migration down into Northern India, came into long and close contact with the Indo-Bactrian and Indo-Parthian kingdoms that sprang up after Alexander. The populations were never Hellenised, but their rulers were to some extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation.
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