Kanishka

This linguistic transition is captured beautifully on Kanishka’s extensive coinage, which acts as a metal archive of a shifting imperial identity. The earliest coins of his reign utilize the Greek language and script, declaring him Basileus Basileon Kaneshkou—King of Kings, Kanishka—and featuring Hellenic deities such as Helios, Selene, and Hephaistos. These early inscriptions, however, are rife with spelling and syntactical errors, suggesting a bureaucracy operating in a language it was rapidly forgetting. Soon, the Greek pantheon vanished from the mints, replaced by an astonishing assembly of Iranian, Indic, and even Sumero-Elamite divinities. On the reverses of these coins, one finds the Zoroastrian fire-god Atar, the wind-god Vata, the lunar deity Mah, the victorious Verethragna, and Mithra in his various guises. Alongside them stood Nana, a pan-Asiatic goddess associated with Anahita, and Oesho, a multifaceted divinity representing the wind-god Vayu conflated with the Hindu god Shiva.

Though Kanishka’s personal faith remained deeply rooted in this ecumenical, largely Iranian-Indic pantheon, his historical legacy is inextricably bound to the destiny of Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, Kanishka was a patron of transcendent importance, comparable to the Maurya emperor Ashoka. While historians debate whether he ever formally converted to the faith, there is no doubt that his political patronage transformed it. He summoned the Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir, presided over by the venerable scholars Vasumitra and Ashwaghosha. At this assembly, three monumental commentaries on the Buddhist Canon were composed, one for each of the "three baskets" of the tradition. Kanishka reportedly had these treatises engraved on copper plates, secured them in stone boxes, and buried them beneath a memorial mound. Though the original plates are lost, the intellectual shift they represented survived through Chinese translations. The council marked a transition toward the use of Sanskrit as a major vehicle for Buddhist scholarship, a linguistic shift that altered the intellectual life of the subcontinent.

Under Kanishka’s stewardship, the visual language of Buddhism underwent a radical evolution. It was during his reign that the first anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha appeared, structured around the thirty-two physical marks of a great man. Kanishka patronized two distinct and brilliant schools of art: the Gandhara school, heavily influenced by Hellenistic naturalism, and the Mathura school, rooted in indigenous Indian artistic traditions. His coins offer some of the earliest dated depictions of the Buddha in human form. These rare issues—constituting less than one percent of his surviving coinage—depict the standing Buddha in a heavy monastic robe covering both shoulders, a hallmark of the Gandharan style. Other copper coins depict the historical Shakyamuni Buddha with his right hand in the fear-dispelling abhaya mudra, or the future Buddha, the Bodhisattva Maitreya, seated cross-legged upon a columned throne, holding a water pot.

Nowhere was Kanishka’s devotion to Buddhist architecture more visible than in his stupa at Purushapura. Rediscovered by archaeologists in the early twentieth century, the base of this colossal monument measured eighty-seven meters in diameter. According to the accounts of Chinese pilgrims who journeyed to the region centuries later, the stupa rose hundreds of feet into the air, clad in timber and iron, crowned with gilded umbrellas, and shimmering with jewels. It was a physical anchor for the faith, visible for miles across the Peshawar valley, demonstrating the wealth and piety of the Kushan state.

This patronage of Buddhism had geopolitical consequences that reverberated across the Eurasian landmass. By securing the trade routes of the Silk Road and pacifying the mountain corridors of the Pamirs and the Karakorams, Kanishka facilitated the safe passage of merchants, pilgrims, and monastics. It was along these secure arteries that Mahayana Buddhism traveled from the monasteries of Gandhara into the Tarim Basin and, eventually, into Han Dynasty China.

Yet, this vast, wealthy empire was constantly forced to defend its borders. To the west, Kanishka’s forces reportedly clashed with and repelled an invasion by the Parthian Empire. To the northeast, the Kushans confronted the westward expansion of China's Han Dynasty. Chinese records chronicle a massive military expedition of seventy thousand Kushan soldiers, led by a viceroy named Xie, who marched across the Pamir Mountains around 90 CE to confront the Han general Ban Chao near Khotan. Though that particular expedition ended in a Kushan retreat due to Ban Chao’s scorched-earth tactics, several of Kanishka's coins have been found within the Tarim Basin, testifying to the enduring commercial and political pressure the Kushans exerted on the region.

Kanishka’s reign ultimately acted as a grand crucible. By uniting the nomadic energy of the steppes with the administrative traditions of the Hellenistic world, the religious fervor of India, and the cosmological systems of Persia, his empire became the ultimate intermediary of the ancient world. When Kanishka's reign ended around 144 CE, he left behind an empire at its geopolitical and cultural zenith. The migrations of the Central Asian nomads had not merely disrupted old empires; under Kanishka, they had built a bridge between East and West, fostering a globalized ancient economy and permanently reshaping the spiritual landscape of Asia.