Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/276

 238 THE KUSHAN OB INDO - SCYTHIAN DYNASTY proximate successors, give vivid expression in classical forms of considerable artistic merit to this modified Buddhism, a religion with a complicated mythology and well-filled pantheon. The florid Corinthian capitals and many other characteristic features of the style prove that the Gandhara school was merely a branch of the cosmopolitan Graeco-Roman art of the early empire. In Buddhist ecclesiastical history the reign of Ka- nishka is specially celebrated for the convocation of a council, organized on the model of that supposed to have been summoned by Asoka. Kanishka's council, which is ignored by the Ceylonese chroniclers, who probably never heard of it, is known only from the traditions of Northern India, as preserved by Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian writers. The accounts of this assembly, like those of the earlier councils, are dis- crepant, and the place of meeting is named variously as the Kundalavana Vihara, somewhere in Kashmir, the Kuvana monastery at Jalandhar in the north of the Pan jab, or Kandahar. According to some authorities, the assembly, like its predecessors, was concerned with the compilation and expurgation of the scriptures purporting to be the very words of Buddha, while, according to others, its business was restricted to the preparation of elab- orate commentaries on all the three pitakas, or main divisions, of the pre-existing canon. Comparison of the different authorities may be held to justify the conclu- sion that the council was a reality; that it met first