Buddhism reached Central Asia and China through territory the Kushans controlled, and the timing is not a coincidence. Erik Zurcher's study of the arrival of Buddhism in China notes that the earliest translators working in the Han capital came from Parthian, Sogdian and Indo Scythian backgrounds, which is to say from the world the Kushan empire straddled. The empire supplied the roads, the security and the merchant networks along which monks travelled, and the monasteries along the routes were funded by the trade.
The period also produced the Buddha in human form. Workshops in Gandhara, and separately at Mathura, began making images of the Buddha as a figure rather than representing him by a footprint, a tree or an empty seat, and the Gandharan version, with its draped robe and its debt to Hellenistic sculpture, is the ancestor of a great deal of later Buddhist art across Asia.
Buddhist tradition remembers Kanishka as a royal patron on the scale of Ashoka and places a council in his reign, and the atlas records that as tradition rather than as documented history, since the accounts are later, they come from one branch of the tradition, and the sectarian traditions do not agree about what the council decided or whether it happened at all.