Kanishka's coins show a king hedging his bets among the gods
The Kushan emperor Kanishka never became a Buddhist, yet he chaired a great Buddhist council and put the Buddha on gold coins, some of the earliest images of him ever minted. The same coinage honours Greek sun gods, the Persian Mithra and Shiva, a pocket-sized record of an empire mixing faiths.
Kanishka ruled around 127 to 150, when the Kushan empire was at its height, stretching from southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan across Gandhara into northern India as far as Mathura. His main capital was Puruṣapura, today's Peshawar. The Rabatak inscription lists his lineage back to his great-grandfather Kujula Kadphises, the dynasty's founder. Of Yuezhi descent, he probably spoke Tocharian at home. Scholars once dated his accession to 78, the start of the Saka calendar, but that view has been dropped.
His coins trace a cultural shift. Early issues call him king of kings in Greek, with Greek deities such as Helios and Selene, and the Greek is riddled with spelling mistakes. Around 127 he made Bactrian, an Iranian language, the official tongue of government, and later coins swap the Greek gods for Iranian ones like Mithra and the goddess Nana. They were still written in Greek letters, plus one extra sign for the sh sound in Kushan. On them the king appears bearded, in coat and trousers, flames rising from his shoulders as he sacrifices at a small altar.
Fewer than one percent of his coins are Buddhist, and only six gold ones showing the Buddha are known. The images are rough, with oversized ears and feet planted apart like the king's own stance. Buddhist tradition still ranks him among its great patrons. He headed the Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir, relied on the scholar Ashvaghosha as adviser and sponsored both the Greek-influenced Gandhara style and the Mathura school of sculpture.
His grandest monument was a stupa at Peshawar. When archaeologists uncovered its base in 1908 and 1909 they measured a diameter of 87 metres, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang reported a jewelled tower perhaps 180 to 210 metres high. His support for Buddhism helped the faith, especially its Mahayana form, travel over the Karakoram to China along the Silk Road.
Source: Kanishka
