nished by India.

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, i