Persian influence was stronger than Greek.  To it are probably due the many radiant deities who shed their beneficent glory over the Mahayanist pantheon, as well as the doctrine that Bodhisattvas are emanations of Buddhas.  The discoveries of Stein, Pelliot and others have shown that this influence extended across Central Asia to China and one of the most important turns in the fortunes of Buddhism was its association with a Central Asian tribe analogous to the Turks and called Kushans or Yueeh-chih, whose territories lay without as well as within the frontiers of modern India and who borrowed much of their culture from Persia and some from the Greeks.  Their great king Kanishka is a figure in Buddhist annals second only to Asoka.  Unfortunately his date is still a matter of discussion.  The majority of scholars place his accession about 78 A.D. but some put it rather later[16].  The evidence of numismatics and of art indicates that he came towards the end of his dynasty rather than at the beginning and the tradition which makes Asvaghosha his contemporary is compatible with the later date.

Some writers describe Kanishka as the special patron of Mahayanism.  But the description is of doubtful accuracy.  The style of religious art known as Gandharan flourished in his reign and he convened a council which fixed the canon of the Sarvastivadins.  This school was reckoned as Hinayanist and though Asvaghosha enjoys general fame in the Far East as a Mahayanist doctor, yet his undoubted writings are not Mahayanist in the strict sense of the word[17].  But a more ornate and mythological form of religion was becoming prevalent and perhaps Kanishka’s Council arranged some compromise between the old and the new.

After Asvaghosha comes Nagarjuna who may have flourished any time between 125 and 200 A.D.  A legend which makes him live for 300 years is not without significance, for he represents a movement and a school as much as a personality and if he taught in the second century A.D. he cannot have been the founder of Mahayanism.  Yet he seems to be the first great name definitely connected with it and the ascription to him of numerous later treatises, though unwarrantable, shows that his authority was sufficient to stamp a work or a doctrine as orthodox Mahayanism.  His biographies connect him with the system of idealist or nihilistic metaphysics expounded in the literature (for it is more than a single work) called Prajnaparamita, with magical practices (by which the power of summoning Bodhisattvas or deities is specially meant) and with the worship of Amitabha.  His teacher Saraha, a foreigner, is said to have been the first who taught this worship in India.  In this there may be a kernel of truth but otherwise the extant accounts of Nagarjuna are too legendary to permit of historical deductions.  He was perhaps the first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of thought was not new:  it was the result of applying to the external world the same destructive logic which Gotama applied to the soul and the result had considerable analogies to Sankara’s version of the Vedanta.  Whether in the second century A.D. the leaders of Buddhism already identified themselves with the sorcery which demoralized late Indian Mahayanism may be doubted, but tradition certainly ascribes to Nagarjuna this corrupting mixture of metaphysics and magic.