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Gandhara was a Persian province from 530 to 330 B.C. and in the succeeding centuries the north-western parts of India experienced the invasions and settlements of numerous aliens, such as Greeks from the Hellenistic kingdoms which arose after Alexander's expedition, Parthians, Sakas and Kushans.
The reader may expect me to discuss at length the date of Kanishka's accession, but I do not propose to do so for it may be hoped that in the next few years archælogical research in India or Central Asia will fix the chronology of the Kushans and meanwhile it is waste of time to argue about probabilities or at any rate it can be done profitably only in special articles.
The goddess Anahit, who was worshipped with immoral rites in Bactria, is figured on the coins of the Kushans and must at one time have been known on the north-western borders of India. At the present day Śîtalâ and in south India Mariamman are goddesses of smallpox who require propitiation, and one of the earliest deities known to have been worshipped by the Tamils is the goddess Koṭṭavai.
During some centuries India, as a political region, was not delimitated on the north-western side as it is at present and numerous principalities rose and fell which included Indian territory as well as parts of Afghanistan. These states were of at least three classes, Hellenistic, Persian or Parthian, and Scythian, if that word can be properly used to include the Sakas and Kushans.
The fragments of obscure Greek writers and the notes of a travelling Chinaman furnish more trustworthy data about important epochs in the history of the Hindus than the whole of their gigantic literature, in which there has been found no mention of Alexander's invasion and only scattered allusions to the conquests of the Sakas, Kushans and Hûnas.
Greeks, Kushans, Huns, and Mohammedans penetrated into the north but, until after the fall of Vijayanagar in 1565, no invader professing a foreign religion entered the country of the Tamils. Left in peace they elaborated their own version of current theological problems and the result spread over India. Buddhism and Jainism also flourished in the south.
Kanishka, like Constantine, probably favoured a winning cause, and Buddhism may have been gradually making its way among the Kushans and their neighbours for a couple of centuries before his time. In any case, however important his reign may have been for the Buddhist Church, I do not think that the history of the Mahayana should be made to depend on his date.
Late in life Vasubandhu, moved by the entreaties of his brother Asanga, became a devout Mahayanist and wrote in his old age Mahayanist treatises and commentaries. Kashmir was certainly included in the dominions of the Kushans and was a favourite residence of Kanishka. About 90 A.D. a Kushan king attacked Central Asia but was repulsed by the Chinese general Pan-Ch'ao.
Some were Greeks and some Iranians but the most important were the Kushans who ruled over an Empire embracing both north-western India and regions beyond it in Afghanistan and Central Asia. This Empire came to an end in the third century A.D. but the causes of its collapse are obscure.
Little can be said except that the power of the Kushans decayed and that northern India was probably invaded by Persians and Central Asian tribes. The same trouble did not affect southern India and it may be that religion and speculation flourished there and spread northwards, as certainly happened in later times.
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