The Great Kushans

With the accession of Kanishka, Kushan history entered its third and most signif­icant phase—t hat of the “Great Kushans”—which A. K. Narain enthusiastically argued “must be counted as one of the great periods of world history.”^[964] Kanishka, who reigned perhaps from 127 to 153 ce, introduced a new dating system, en­graving his coins from the “Year 1” of a new “Kanishkan Era.” This had led scholars to conclude that Kanishka was the founder of a new dynasty, but the Rabatak in­scription shows that his reign represented a continuance of the genealogical line begun by Kujula Kadphises.

Territorial expansion of the empire continued during the reign of Kanishka, under whom the Kushan realm appears to have reached its greatest extent. The Rabatak inscription, and the declaration of a new era in Kushan history, might have been promulgated to reflect a successful campaign of conquest in the Ganges Basin of northern India. The Hou Hanshu makes reference to a new “Eastern Division of the Kushan Empire” (Dongli), clearly distinguishing this from the heartland of the Kushan Empire.^[966] The capital of Dongli is identified as Saketa, in eastern India. Later Chinese Buddhist accounts mention Kanishka's “punitive expedition” against India, noting that “when (that country) had been pacified, his majestic power made the world tremble and his success was complete.”^[967] Other Chinese sources note Kanishka's defeat ofthe city of Pataliputra in India;^[968] and there is also this exaggerated reference to a bloody but otherwise unsubstantiated campaign against the Parthians:

At that time the king of Anxi (Parthia) was cruel and obstinate, and having marshalled his four (classes of) soldiers he attacked Kanishka.

During the reign of Kanishka, Kushan coinage underwent further modification. Kanishka's gold and copper coins have been found in their thousands throughout Inner Asia, from Uzbekistan to Xinjiang to northern India. On the obverse of all his coins Kanishka is depicted standing and sacrificing at a small fire altar. Like his father, Kanishka also features a range of gods on his coins, although the over­whelming majority is derived from the Zoroastrian pantheon. Kanishka mod­ified existing designs by introducing a new form of reverse inscription that actually named the deity being depicted on the reverse.^[970] But as noted earlier, his most significant innovation was to abandon the Greek coin inscriptions used by his predecessors (and by Kanishka in his earliest issues) and replace them with the Bactrian language, written using Greek letters. Despite these innovations, Kanishka and his successors Huvishka and Vasudeva continued to issue the standard range of copper and gold coins established by Vima Kadphises. The remarkable weight consistency maintained by the Kushan minters during the reigns of the two Vimas and Kanishka is further evidence of stability and strong central government, al­though there was a substantial (and thus far unexplained) devaluation of Kushan copper coins during the reign of Huvishka. In general, the coinage of the three great Kushan kings reflects a tolerant and broadminded approach to religion, depicting Greek, Indian, and Zoroastrian deities. The most common obverse royal portrait shows the king sacrificing over a small Zoroastrian fire altar, indicating the cen­trality of Iranian spirituality to the “Great Kushan” monarchs.

Yet Kanishka is also recognized as a great patron of Buddhism, and the depiction of Buddha on some of his coins is among the first physical representations of the Buddha.

Kanishka is also venerated in Chinese Buddhist literature for the construction of numerous stupas and monasteries throughout his realm,^[972] and for having convened a great Buddhist gathering at Kashmir, at which the important decision was made to systematize and translate the Servastivadin Abhidharma texts from earlier Prakrit vernacular languages (which used Gandharan and Prakrit scripts) into the classical language of Sanskrit. Tang Dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang noted that Kanishka had the new scriptures transcribed on copper plates, which were in turn housed in stone coffers and deposited inside a tremendous stupa over 400 feet high.^[973] The Sanskrit version of the Sutras was partly responsible for a surge in the popularity of Mahayana (or “Great Vehicle”) Buddhism, which was then carried across Central and East Asia by merchants and monks using the Silk Roads, allowing for the estab­lishment of the ideology in China during the Later Han dynasty, and its subsequent spread into Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

We also noted briefly in the introduction to this chapter that the “Great Kushan” kings were patrons of important art “schools,” sponsoring major workshops in Gandhara (located between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya, with a south­eastern extension to the Indus) and Mathura (on the Jamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges, in northern India). The output of these schools is another quintessential example of cultural syncretism, and the sculpture produced in both regions was highly influential on the subsequent development of South and East Asian art.

In addition to producing Buddhist sculpture and a series of royal Kushan portraits, Mathuran artists also developed a naturalistic school that depicted images of voluptuous women, musicians and dancers, and amorous couples, often in erotic poses. This imagery was also influential in the emergence of the humanist and sen­sual values of subsequent Indian art. Gandharan secular sculpture, particularly the realistic stair riser reliefs with their vivid images of musicians, dancers, and amused Kushan aristocracy, provides important evidence of Kushan social life. So stylistically unmistakable is the syncretistic sculpture of Gandhara that Sir Aurel Stein, in his expeditions into Central Asia in the early decades of the twentieth century, claimed to be able to trace the spread of Kushano-Gandharan cultural influence across the Tarim Basin and into China, based on his recognition of stylistic similarities he observed in Buddhist sculpture unearthed at sites along the old northern Silk Roads route around the Taklimakan Desert. At Miran, for example, Stein noted that:

[t]he surviving drapery of these colossal seated Buddhas proved how closely the sculptor in faraway Lop Nor had followed the elaborate arrangement of the folds which the Graeco-Buddhist style of Gandhara had derived from classical models.^[975]

Coins, and occasional inscriptions, provide the best evidence for the two kings who succeeded Kanishka during the era of the “Great Kushans.” Kanishka was followed by Huvishka, a succession confirmed by a die link between a late coin of Kanishka and an early coin of Huvishka,^[976] whose long reign of almost 40 years can be dated from ca.

The last of the “Great Kushans,” Vasudeva (ca. 191-ca. 225?) was presumably the son of Huvishka and perhaps a Hindu mother, given that the deity Vasudeva was named after is recognized in the Hindu pantheon as the father of Krishna. King Vasudeva is also known mostly through his coins, which have been discovered in their thousands, but also by his inscriptions found mainly at Mathura. Like the coins of Kanishka, Vasudeva is mostly depicted on his obverses standing beside a small fire altar, but where Kanishka is holding a spear, Vasudeva holds a trident, perhaps to indicate that the sacrifice was intended for Siva. Indeed Vasudeva's reverses mostly depict the Indian god Siva, often with his bull Nandi, although the god's name is often inscribed as the Iranian god Oesho. This has variously been interpreted as ev­idence of the possible “Indianization” of the Kushan monarchy, or of a lessening in religious tolerance, or alternatively as further evidence of Kushan religious syncre­tism, blending the images and names of gods from multiple traditions.