The Tibetan Lama Taranatha who completed his History of Indian Buddhism[163] in 1608 is a less satisfactory authority.  He merits attention but also scepticism and caution.  His work is a compilation but is not to be despised on that ground, for the Tibetan translations of Sanskrit works offer a rich mine of information about the history of the Mahayana.  Unfortunately few of these works take the historical point of view and Taranatha’s own method is as uncritical as his materials.  Dire confusion prevails as to chronology and even as to names,[164] so that the work is almost useless as a connected account, though it contains many interesting details.

Two epochs are of special importance for the development of later Indian Buddhism, that of Kanishka and that of Vasubandhu and his brother Asanga.  The reader may expect me to discuss at length the date of Kanishka’s accession, but I do not propose to do so for it may be hoped that in the next few years archaelogical research in India or Central Asia will fix the chronology of the Kushans and meanwhile it is waste of time to argue about probabilities or at any rate it can be done profitably only in special articles.  At present the majority of scholars place his accession at about 78 A.D., others put it back to 58 B.C. and arrange the Kushan kings in a different order,[165] while still others[166] think that he did not come to the throne until the second century was well advanced.  The evidence of art, particularly of numismatics, indicates that Kanishka reigned towards the end of his dynasty rather than at the beginning, but the use of Greek on his coins and his traditional connection with the beginnings of the Mahayana are arguments against a very late date.  If the date 78 A.D. is accepted, the conversion of the Yueeh-chih to Buddhism and its diffusion in Central Asia cannot have been the work of Kanishka, for Buddhism began to reach China by land about the time of the Christian era.[167] There is however no reason to assume that they were his work.  Kanishka, like Constantine, probably favoured a winning cause, and Buddhism may have been gradually making its way among the Kushans and their neighbours for a couple of centuries before his time.  In any case, however important his reign may have been for the Buddhist Church, I do not think that the history of the Mahayana should be made to depend on his date.  Chinese translations, supported by other evidence, indicate that the Mahayanist movement had begun about the time of our era.  If it is proved that Kanishka lived considerably later, we should not argue that Mahayanism is later than was supposed but rather that his relation towards it has been misunderstood.[168]