Kushan Empire

The most direct evidence for Kushan religion is small and portable. The dynasty's coins carry, on their reverses, a remarkable range of deities with their names written beside them: Iranian figures such as Mithro, Mao and Nana, Greek ones such as Helios and Herakles, Indian ones including Shiva under the name Oesho, and the Buddha, labelled Boddo, in a very rare early instance of the Buddha on a state coinage.

No other ancient state issued anything comparable. What it means is argued. The coins may record a genuinely plural religious policy, a court that patronised many communities, a ruler's personal devotions, or a sequence of shifts across a long reign, and the same evidence supports more than one of those. What is not in doubt is the geography behind it.

The Kushan realm ran from Bactria across Gandhara into northern India and sat on the routes between the Iranian world, the Indian world and the trade going east, so a coinage that had to circulate among all of those populations had reasons to speak several religious languages at once. The atlas records the deities as attested and the underlying policy as debated, and notes that the Kushan royal sanctuaries known from Bactria, with their dynastic images and inscriptions in an Iranian language written in Greek letters, show the same mixture of inheritances in another medium entirely.

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.