In India they would of course be supported by imperial influence, and indeed the mission to Ceylon, headed by Mahinda, the son of Asoka, seems to have been accredited by royal embassy; but nowhere was Buddhism propagated as Islam subsequently was by Mohammed, or as Christianity was by Charlemagne, with an army at its back. Races ever ready to credit the supernatural would probably be more easily won by the wonders which were then being formulated in reference to Buddha; but whatever be the explanation of it, the success of these missionaries anticipated that of the apostles. In Ceylon there was founded a Sangha, which was destined to nurse and preserve the original creed in somewhat of its purity, when all the others betrayed and corrupted it. Surviving several changes of dynasty, that Sangha, 330 years after Buddha’s decease, is said to have reduced its canon to writing. The result has been somewhat contradictory to the theory, that it matters very little whether a canon be oral or written, for Southern Buddhism, having an authority to which it was thus earlier anchored, has held more closely to the original system, from which, having no such check for long, every section of Northern Buddhism has irrecoverably fallen away. After the death of Asoka, the empire which he sought to consolidate by the preaching of the Law fell to pieces, and Buddhism was destined to be tested by more than one rude shock. A Brahman reaction took place, which is even supposed to have resulted in the persecution of all Buddhists living in India. If so, it was the first which the religion encountered—so unlike Christianity, which had to endure for three centuries the fierce assaults of its enemies. Persecution by a religion so tolerant as Brahmanism is hard to conceive, but if it took place at this period, it only tended, as in the early Christian trials, to the wider expansion of the persecuted faith. “They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching” the Law. Some of them pushed through Afghanistan into the regions of Central Asia, and there, just as Ulphilas and Severinus, centuries later, gained a hold over the wild races that conquered the moribund Empire, so Buddhist missionaries succeeded in sowing the seeds of their Law among the rude Scythian tribes, who were then in great commotion in their vast inland steppes. Driven from their ancestral homes, a branch of the great tribe of Huns about 160 B.C. overthrow the Bactrian kingdom, and after generations of struggle they conquered Kashmir, the Punjab, and a considerable part of India. Then just as the Goths and Huns, in the moment of their conquest of Rome, tendered their submission to Christianity, so the conversion of Kaniska, the greatest of the Indo-Scythian kings, a contemporary with Augustus and Antony, enabled Buddhism to enter with fresh vigour upon a second period of very brilliant supremacy.[335]