Kanishka's Kushan Empire Reached From Bukhara to Patna, His Gold Coins Carried the Buddha, and the Peshawar Stupa Identified as His Measured 286 Feet Across

Kanishka was the Kushan emperor whose domain, in Britannica’s description, ran from Bukhara in the west to Patna on the Ganges in the east, and from the Pamirs in the north to central India in the south. His capital was probably Purushapura, today’s Peshawar. The British Museum catalogues his gold coins as made about 127 to 150 CE, which matches the dating Harry Falk set out in Encyclopaedia Iranica, and this article follows it. A later section explains how the date was fixed and who has argued for others.

He left more physical evidence than most rulers of his age. His coins carry his name in two languages and the Buddha’s image. A bronze casket from a stupa (a dome-shaped Buddhist monument that holds relics) names his monastery. A Bactrian inscription, written in a language of ancient Bactria using Greek letters, says he began a new year count. The Archaeological Survey of India dug out the stupa base in 1908 to 1909 and found it larger than any other stupa known in India.

An empire from Bukhara to Patna

Nicholas Sims-Williams and Harry Falk, writing in Encyclopaedia Iranica, say the Rabatak inscription traces Kanishka’s line back through his father Vima Kadphises and his grandfather Vima Taktu to his great-grandfather Kujula Kadphises. Britannica traces the dynasty to the Yuezhi, a people who conquered Bactria in the 2nd century BCE. The Rabatak text records the founding of a temple that housed statues of Kanishka and his ancestors, and it describes the first years of his reign and the spread of his power over northern India.

Inscriptions inside India show his name travelling. At Sarnath, near Varanasi, a colossal standing Bodhisattva (a Buddha-to-be) and an umbrella shaft carry a date in his third year. E. Hultzsch, who edited them in Epigraphia Indica, said they were the earliest records then found that name Kanishka. The monk Bala is the chief donor, and the satraps (regional governors) Kharapallana and Vanaspara are named with him. Hultzsch added a caution: the donors more probably came from Mathura on a pilgrimage, so the text alone does not prove that Kanishka ruled Varanasi. Sims-Williams and Falk count about 15 dated inscriptions that use the formula “in the year x of the Maharaja Kanishka.” They also say the great Bactrian inscription at Surkh Kotal makes him the founder of the temple there.

Kashmir offers coins and a place name. Aurel Stein, translating the 12th-century chronicle of Kalhana in 1900, wrote that copper coins of Kanishka and his successor Huvishka turn up in “remarkable abundance” at old sites there. He added that Kaniskapura, a town the chronicle ascribes to Kanishka, was still in existence.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who reached India in the 7th century, recorded a tradition that Kanishka governed a wide territory even east of the T’sung-ling mountains. In Samuel Beal’s translation, tribes west of a river sent hostages, and Kanishka gave them separate quarters by season: winter in India, summer in Kapisa, spring and autumn in Gandhara. Britannica says only that he may have crossed the Pamirs and subjugated the city-states of Khotan, Kashgar and Yarkand. It credits contacts with Rome along the Silk Road with an increase in trade during his reign.

Further north-west, the walled city of Sirsukh at Taxila is Kushan work, and sources differ on whether Kanishka or Vima Kadphises founded it, as tuput’s piece on Taxila sets out.

Coins that changed language early in the reign

Robert Bracey, writing in Encyclopaedia Iranica, describes Kanishka’s first gold coins as carrying his name and title in Greek. After the first year of his reign the mints used Bactrian instead, still in Greek letters. Bracey pins the moment on a die, the stamp that strikes a coin, on which the Greek label Heracles was recut to the Bactrian Wesho. Greek was already rare in Kushan inscriptions, according to Sims-Williams and Falk, and probably ceased at about the same time.

The reverse designs carried more than 20 deities across the reigns of Kanishka and Huvishka, Bracey writes, with about half a dozen dominant. Scholars have called the set a mixture of Greek, Iranian and Indian gods. Bracey says the images are probably more eclectic in their pictures than in any theology, and that recent work reads the pantheon as Iranian in conception. The British Museum’s gold coins of Kanishka show the king standing at an altar, with Mao or Miiro on the reverse. They weigh about 7.9 grams and are 19 millimetres across, close to the roughly 8 gram gold dinar Bracey names as the standard. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a gold coin of Kanishka that it dates to about 130.

Bracey also describes Buddha coins struck late in the reign, in copper and in gold. They show the standing Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, and the seated Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. They are a very small part of the output, and he suggests they were made for a specific event. The British Museum’s gold example, catalogued IOC.289, weighs 7.06 grams, shows the king at an altar, and has a standing figure labelled Boddo on the back. Its findspot is recorded as Ahin Posh.

The stupa at Shah-ji-ki-Dheri

The Chinese pilgrims wrote about the building before anyone dug for it. Faxian, in James Legge’s translation, says Kanishka raised a tope, Legge’s word for a stupa, “more than four hundred cubits high” on the spot where the Buddha had foretold one to Ananda, and adds that a current saying called it “the finest tope in Jambudvipa.” Xuanzang, in Beal’s rendering, gives 400 feet and a base a li and a half around, and has a white hare lead the king to a shepherd boy building a small stupa.

D. B. Spooner dug at Shah-ji-ki-Dheri, near Peshawar, for the Archaeological Survey. The 1907 to 1908 season found nothing certain. The Survey’s report for 1908 to 1909 says the digging reached the relic chamber and measured the monument at 286 feet across, counting its projections. It compares Sanchi at 106 feet and the Manikyala stupa at 159 feet 2 inches. John Marshall, the Survey’s director-general, called it “the largest stupa of Northern India” in the report’s introduction. A copper coin of Kanishka lay beside the relic chamber.

Inside was a gilded bronze casket 18 centimetres tall. The University of Sydney’s edition of its text describes a seated Buddha between Indra and Brahma on the lid, and a standing Kushan king on the side with Mao and Miiro above his shoulders. The inscription records a relic gift by the architects Mahasena and Samgharaksita in Kanishkapura, at the Kanishka monastery. Within the casket sat a six-sided crystal holding three small bone fragments, which Spooner called “undoubtedly the original relics deposited in the stupa by Kanishka.” The report says the Survey handed the relics to the Buddhist community of Burma for a new pagoda at Mandalay, and the Sydney edition says they remain there. The casket went to the Peshawar Museum.

Two schools of Buddhist art in one reign

Britannica describes two styles, from Gandhara in the north-west and from Mathura on the Ganges plain. The Gandhara style borrowed Greco-Roman motifs, and Britannica says each school seems to have developed its own Buddha image independently by about the 1st century CE. Bracey adds that the earliest dated sculptures of Buddhas come from Kanishka’s reign.

Spooner drew a conclusion from the casket in the Survey’s report. Citing Marshall, he wrote that its workmanship shows artistic decline, so the idea that Gandharan Buddhist art began or peaked under Kanishka could no longer be held, and the school must be considerably older. The Sarnath Bodhisattva belongs to the same reign, in its third year, which falls in 129 or 130 CE on Falk’s count. Hultzsch noted that the monk Bala turns up again on a Mathura image dated to year 33 of Huvishka, exactly 30 years later.

The council Xuanzang placed in Kashmir

Xuanzang tells of a council. In Beal’s translation, Kanishka, king of Gandhara, studied the Buddhist books each day and found the schools contradicted one another. The monk Parsva told him the communities were divided, and the king summoned teachers from far and wide. Successive edicts narrowed the crowd to 499 men, and Vasumitra was added as president, making 500.

They wrote commentaries on the three divisions of the canon, ten myriad verses for each. Kanishka then had the texts engraved on sheets of red copper, sealed them in a stone chest and built a stupa over it. Xuanzang sets the story in a Kashmir that, in his account, Ashoka had earlier given to the monks along with 500 monasteries, a king covered in tuput’s piece on Ashoka.

Britannica’s entry on Buddhist councils says the chronicles of the Sarvastivada school, whose name means “All Is Real,” place a council under Kanishka at Jalandhara or, in other sources, in Kashmir, with Vasumitra as president. It adds that Theravada sources are silent about it and that, because Kanishka’s dates are uncertain, the council’s date is too, perhaps about 100 CE.

How the date was fixed

Falk’s argument in Encyclopaedia Iranica starts with a Sanskrit astronomical text, the Yavanajataka of Sphujiddhvaja, written in the 4th century. It contains a rule that a Kushan year number plus 149 gives the year in the Saka era, which began in 78 CE. That makes 227 CE the first year of a Kushan century. Kushan dates dropped the hundreds, so a text reading year 18 could mean year 18 or year 118. Counting back one century gives 127 CE for the year Kanishka began his era.

The Rabatak inscription says Kanishka “inaugurated the year one.” It also seems to mention his third and sixth years, so Sims-Williams and Falk conclude it was cut no earlier than 132 CE. Falk adds that 127 CE need not be the first year of the reign, only one of its earliest. Christopher Bennett’s work, which Falk cites, matches Kanishka’s year 1 to year 301 of the older Yavana era, as though he had restarted the count at a new century.

What is still argued

Britannica gives his accession as somewhere between 78 and 144 CE, with a reign of about 23 years, and notes that 78 marks the start of the Saka era. In 1900 Stein summarised an older split between those who put Kanishka at 78 CE and Sylvain Levi, who placed him near the start of the Christian era. Richard Salomon wrote on the Indology mailing list in 2002 that the new evidence was “persuasive but not conclusive,” and that 78 CE was not absolutely ruled out. Sims-Williams and Falk, in 2014, wrote that Falk had convincingly placed the era at 127/8 CE.

Other questions remain open. A headless statue in the Mathura Museum bears an inscription naming Kanishka. Sims-Williams and Falk point out in Iranica that the title “king of kings” was written over an earlier “Kanishka,” and suggest the statue may show Vima Kadphises, given a new head and label when the shrine was rebuilt. The same article notes that G. Fussman regards Sims-Williams’s readings of the Rabatak text as unduly speculative, while Sims-Williams has argued that Fussman is too sceptical. The Sydney edition says later studies softened Spooner’s case that Shah-ji-ki-Dheri was Kanishka’s own stupa.

The line after him

Bracey counts 13 kings in the modern list of the dynasty, from the mid-1st century to the late 4th. He dates Kanishka I to 127 to 150 CE, Huvishka to 150 to 190, Vasudeva to 190 to 230, and Kanishka II to about 230 to 247. The twelfth king, Shaka, appears in the Allahabad pillar inscription of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta, the pillar described in tuput’s piece on the Gupta golden age. The text gives him the Kushan titles daivaputra, shahi and shahanushahi, which makes him the only one of the last four kings that Bracey says an inscription names.