276 THE GUPTA EMPIRE AND THE WHITE HUNS ship of Siva as practised by his new subjects, that he constantly placed the image of that Indian god upon his coins and described himself as his devotee. Many other facts concur to prove the continued worship of the old Hindu gods during the period in which Bud- dhism was unquestionably the most popular and gen- erally received creed. In some respects, Buddhism in its Mahayana form was better fitted than the Brahmanical system to attract the reverence of casteless foreign chieftains, and it would not be unreasonable to expect that they should have shown a decided tendency to favour Buddhism rather than Brahmanism; but the facts do not indicate any clearly marked general preference for the Buddhist creed on the part of the foreigners. The only distinct- ively Buddhist coins are the few rare pieces of that kind struck by Kanishka, who undoubtedly, in his later years, liberally patronized the ecclesiastics of the Bud- dhist Church, as did his successor, Huvishka; but the next king, Yasudeva, reverted to the devotion for Siva, as displayed by Kadphises II. So the later Saka satraps of Surashtra seem to have inclined personally much more to the Brahmanical than to the Buddhist cult, and they certainly bestowed their patronage upon the Sanskrit of the Brahmans rather than upon the vernacular literature. The development of the Mahayana school of Bud- dhism, which became prominent and fashionable from the time of Kanishka in the second century, was in itself a testimony to the reviving power of Brahmanical Hindu-
