Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/272

 234 THE KUSHAN OR INDO - SCYTHIAN DYNASTY of intercourse between India and China before the time of the Yueh-chi invasion. The statement that the Em- peror Ming-ti sent for Buddhist teachers in or about 64 A. D., although rejected by Wassiljew, has been ac- cepted by most writers; but even those authors who admit the fact that Buddhist missionaries reached China at that date allow that their influence was very slight and limited. The effective introduction of Buddhism into China appears not to have taken place until the reign of Hwan-ti, about the middle of the second cen- tury, when " the people of China generally adopted this new religion, and its followers became numerous." This development of Chinese Buddhism was apparently the direct result of Kanishka's conquest of Khotan, and it is consequently improbable that the Han prince brought his Buddhist creed with him. It may be as- sumed that he adopted it during his stay in India and that when he returned home he became an agent for its diffusion in his native land. Wassiljew 's view that the Buddhist religion did not become widely known in China until the fourth century is not inconsistent with the belief that the Indian system was effectively introduced to a limited extent two centuries earlier. The stories told about Kanishka's conversion and his subsequent zeal for Buddhism have so much resem- blance to the Asoka legends that it is difficult to decide how far they are traditions of actual fact, and how far merely echoes of an older tradition. The Yueh-chi monarch did not record passages from his autobiogra- phy as Asoka did, and when we are informed in the