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Updated: June 29, 2025


Formerly, when Buddha was travelling in this country with his disciples, he said to Ânanda, "After my pari-nirvâna, there will be a king named Kanishka, who shall on this spot build a tope."

To the present day there are traces outside the northern gate of Peshawar of a great Buddhist monastery, also built by Kanishka, which remained a seat of Buddhist learning until it was destroyed by Mahomedan invaders; and it was only a mile from Peshawar that the American Sanskritist, Dr.

It would be dangerous to say that these ideas did not exist in the time of Kanishka, but what is known of the development of doctrine leads us to expect their full expression not then but a century or two later and other circumstances raise suspicions as to Aśvaghosha's authorship.

This king was perhaps Kanishka himself, Fa-Hsien mixing up, in an inartistic way, different legends about him. Eitel suggests that a relic of the old name of the country may still exist in that of the Jats or Juts of the present day.

It was not till after another great conquering inflow from Central Asia in the first century of our era that Kanishka, the greatest of a new dynasty which had set itself up at Purushpura, situated close to the modern Peshawar, shed a transient gleam of glory over the decline of Buddhism and even restored it to the position of a state religion.

King Kanishka caused the treatises when finished to be written out on copper plates and enclosed these in stone boxes which he deposited in a tope made for the purpose. He then ordered spirits to keep and guard the texts and not to allow any to be taken out of the country by heretics; those who wished to study them could do so in the country.

His action resembles that of Constantine who after his conversion to Christianity proceeded to summon the Council of Nicæa in order to stop the dissensions of the Church and settle what were the tenets of the religion which he had embraced, a point about which both he and Kanishka seem to have felt some uncertainty.

The Sarvâstivâdins compiled an Abhidhamma Pitaka of their own, apparently in the time of Kanishka, and the Dharmagupta school also seems to have had its own version of this Pitaka . The date of the Pali Abhidhamma is very doubtful and I do not reject the hypothesis that it was composed in Ceylon, for the Sinhalese seem to have a special taste for such literature.

The Mahayanist scriptures are the largest body of sacred writings extant in the world, but it is not easy either to define the limits of the Canon or to say when it was put together. According to a common tradition Kanishka played for the Church of the Great Vehicle much the same part as Asoka for the Theravâdins and summoned a Council which wrote commentaries on the Tripitaka.

But if he died about 600 A.D. a work quoted by him can hardly have been later than 550 and may be much earlier. Especially remarkable are II. 32 na nirodho na cotpattir, etc., and IV. 59 and the whole argument that causation is impossible. Tradition, as mentioned above, connects the rise of the Mahayana with the reign of Kanishka.

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