With Asoka Buddhism attained to a supremacy in India which may well be compared with that of Christianity in Europe under Constantine; and it is only by measuring the height to which Buddhism had then risen that we can realise the enduring power of Hinduism, as we see it through successive centuries slowly but irresistibly recovering all the ground it had lost until Buddhism at last disappears almost entirely off the face of India, whereas it continued to spread, though often in very debased forms, over the greater part of Eastern Asia, and still maintains its hold there over more than a third of the total population of the globe.

As with most of the great rulers and conquerors that India has from time to time thrown up, Asoka’s life-work fell to pieces almost as soon as he had passed away.  Not only did the temporal empire which he built up disintegrate rapidly in the hands of his feeble successors, but Buddhism itself was dethroned within fifty years with the last of his dynasty, slain by the usurper Pushyamitra Sunga, who, after consecrating himself to the Hindu gods with the rites of Rajasuya, celebrated his advent to Paramount Power by reviving the ancient ceremony of Asvamedha, the Sacrifice of the Horse—­one of the most characteristic of Brahmanical rites.

It was not till after another great conquering inflow from Central Asia in the first century of our era that Kanishka, the greatest of a new dynasty which had set itself up at Purushpura, situated close to the modern Peshawar, shed a transient gleam of glory over the decline of Buddhism and even restored it to the position of a state religion.  But it was a Buddhism already far removed from the purity of Asoka’s reign.  The most striking feature of this short-lived revival is the artistic inspiration which it derived from Hellenistic sources, of which the museums of Peshawar and Lahore contain so many remarkable illustrations.  The theory, at one time very widely entertained, that Alexander’s brief incursion into India left any permanent mark on Indian civilisation is now entirely discarded by the best authorities.  No Indian author makes even the faintest allusion to him, nor is there any trace of Hellenic influence in the evolution of Indian society, or in the elaborate institutions with which India was endowed by the Mauryan dynasty that followed immediately on the disruption of Alexander’s empire.  But the Kushans, or Yueh Chis, during the various stages of their slow migration down into Northern India, came into long and close contact with the Indo-Bactrian and Indo-Parthian kingdoms that sprang up after Alexander.  The populations were never Hellenised, but their rulers were to some extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation.  They spoke Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the conquerors something of their own Greek veneer.  In the second