Purushapura

A Kushan Capital on the Trade Routes

Purushapura, whose name means "City of Men," lay in the fertile Peshawar valley on the Kabul River, at the junction of routes linking Central Asia, Bactria, Kashmir, and the Indian heartland. The Kushans, a Central Asian people who established an empire spanning from present-day Uzbekistan and Afghanistan into the Gangetic plain, elevated the city from a provincial center to their imperial capital under Kanishka I, traditionally dated to the early-to-mid second century CE, though the exact starting point of his regnal era remains a matter of scholarly disagreement. Like other steppe-descended empires ruling a vast, ethnically mixed territory, the Kushans governed from more than one center, with Purushapura serving as a principal winter capital alongside other royal seats further east, such as Mathura. Much of the modern understanding of Kanishka's chronology and titulature rests on the Rabatak inscription, a Bactrian-language stone inscription discovered in Afghanistan in 1993, which prompted historians to revise earlier estimates of when his reign began.

The Great Stupa of Kanishka

The city's most celebrated monument was the Great Stupa built to Kanishka's order, described by the Chinese pilgrims Faxian in the early fifth century and Xuanzang in the seventh as among the tallest structures they had encountered, its spire said to rise several hundred feet and to be encased in gilt copper. The stupa functioned as a major pilgrimage destination, housing relics associated with the Buddha and drawing monks from across Central and East Asia. Its remains, at Shah-ji-ki-Dheri near modern Peshawar, were excavated in 1908-1909 by the archaeologist D. B. Spooner, who recovered the stupa's base and a bronze reliquary — the so-called Kanishka casket — inscribed in Kharoshthi with Kanishka's name and decorated with images of the Buddha flanked by Brahma and Indra, now held at the Peshawar Museum.

Religious Pluralism

Purushapura's Buddhist prominence coexisted with a genuinely plural religious landscape, visible above all in Kushan coinage. Kushan rulers, including Kanishka, minted coins bearing not only the Buddha but Hindu deities such as Shiva (rendered as Oesho) and Skanda, Iranian and Zoroastrian figures such as Mithra and Atar, and Greek deities including Helios and Selene, a numismatic record reflecting the empire's fusion of Indian, Iranian, and Hellenistic religious traditions.

The Gandhara School of Art

Under Kushan patronage, Purushapura and the surrounding Peshawar valley became a center of the Gandhara school of Buddhist art, in which local artisans working in a Hellenistic-derived idiom produced some of the earliest anthropomorphic images of the Buddha, characterized by wavy hair, classical drapery, and naturalistic modeling. A parallel and contemporaneous school developed at Mathura, using red sandstone and drawing on indigenous yaksha-derived iconographic conventions. Art historians continue to debate which region first produced a human image of the Buddha, but together the two schools established the visual conventions of Buddha and Bodhisattva imagery that spread across Asia.

The Fourth Buddhist Council and Mahayana Buddhism

Kanishka is traditionally credited with convening the Fourth Buddhist Council, an assembly of monks that, according to later Buddhist historiography, helped formalize doctrinal positions of the Sarvastivada school and produced an extensive Sanskrit commentary, the Mahavibhasha; traditional accounts place the council in Kashmir, though some sources locate it elsewhere. The period coincided with the broader emergence and spread of Mahayana Buddhism, carried along Kushan-era trade routes into Central Asia and China by missionary monks — among the earliest recorded translators of Mahayana texts into Chinese was Lokakshema, active in Luoyang from around 178 CE.

Decline

Kushan power in the region gave way in the third century CE to Sassanian Persian pressure, producing a period of Kushano-Sasanian rule, and later to the invasions of the Hephthalites, or Alchon Huns, in the fifth century. Xuanzang's account describes the Hun ruler Mihirakula as hostile to Buddhism in the Gandhara region, and by the time of Xuanzang's own seventh-century visit, Purushapura's monuments were already in decline. The city's ancient remains lie beneath modern Peshawar, though the artistic and doctrinal legacy of Kushan-era Purushapura persisted far beyond it, in Gandharan-influenced Buddhist art from Central Asia to East Asia.