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THE GREAT BUDDHIST KINGS canonical Pāli Buddhist scriptures is that called The Questions of Milinda,52 which recounts the religious conversations of a Greek king named “Milinda" (Menander, C. 125 LO C. 95 B.C.) with the Buddhist monk Nāgasena. Some of Menander's coins (which are now collected in museums) bear the Buddhist Wheel of the Law, while Plutarch's account of the distribution of his ashes following his death, which echoes the legend of the distribution of the ashes of the Buddha, would seem to indicate that if the Greek king was not himself actually a member of the Buddhist Order, he was at least so great a bencfactor that the community looked upon him as one of their own.
But this promising idyl of the marriage of East and West was not destined to endure; for at the very moment of its beginning, when Demetrius was breaking into India, remote events were already preparing the conditions of its close. A group of Huns, ranging the country between the southern reaches of the Great Wall of China and the mountains of Nan Shan, dislodged and launched on a long migration westward the people known to Chinesc history as the Yueh-chi. This migration lasted some forty years (c. 165-125B.C.), causing major shifts of population throughout the neighborhood of Sinkiang; new pressures were brought against the borders of the Greek province of Bactria; the defenses broke, and the wild tribesmen of Scythia, pressed from behind by the Yueh-chi, came pouring through. First the Scythians (Sanskrit, Saka), then the Yueh-chi themselves, took over, one by one, the Greek provinces of Bactria, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the lower Indus, and the Punjab. During the brief moment of their pause in Bactria the five tribes of the Yueh-chi had come under the leadership of the most powerful of their number, the so-called Kuşānas; hence it was that they entered India under this appellation. The dominion of the Kuşānas presently pressed eastward far beyond the bounds of Hellenistic India, traversing 61 Milindapañha, Sacred Books of the East, Vols. XXXV-XXXVI.
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