still held its own in the region which had been its
cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra
a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to Buddhism. But as these
Indo-Scythian kings had not been long enough in India to secure
admission to the social aristocracy of Hinduism by that slow process of
naturalisation to which so many ruling families have owed their Kshatrya
pedigrees, Kanishka, having himself no claim to caste, may well have
preferred for reasons of state to favour Buddhism as a creed
fundamentally opposed to caste distinctions. Whatever the motives of his
conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he
ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent _stupa_,
which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and
crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured
a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited
Purushpura five centuries later. To the present day there are traces
outside the northern gate of Peshawar of a great Buddhist monastery,
also built by Kanishka, which remained a seat of Buddhist learning until
it was destroyed by Mahomedan invaders; and it was only a mile from
Peshawar that the American Sanskritist, Dr. Spooner, discovered ten
years ago the casket containing some of Buddha's bones, which is one of
the most perfect specimens of Graeco-Buddhist art. The Buddhist statues
and bas-reliefs of that period are Greek rather than Indian in their
treatment of sacred history, and even the head of Gautama himself might
sometimes be taken for that of a young Greek god.

These exotic influences may indeed have acted as a further solvent upon
Buddhism. But in any case, its local and temporary revival as a dominant
state religion under Kanishka, whose empire did not long outlive him,
failed to arrest its steady resorption into Hinduism. On the one hand,
Buddhism itself was losing much of its original purity. The miraculous
legends with which the life of Buddha was gradually invested, the almost
idolatrous worship paid to him, the belief that he himself was but the
last of many incarnations in which the Buddha had already revealed
himself from the very beginning of creation--all these later accretions
represent, no doubt, the reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic
surroundings. But they doubtless helped also to stimulate the growth of
the more definite forms of anthropomorphism which