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'It appears from the epigraphic record that after the
Kuṣāṇa paramountcy, Buddhists were increasingly displaced in
Indian imperial formations. The later Śātavāhanas, beginning with
Gautamīputra Śrī Sātakarni (first and second centuries A.D.)
sponsored Buddhist activities at Nasik (Mahararashtra) and Dhanakaṭaka (Amarāvatī,
Andhra Pradesh), and the imperial Ikṣvākus (second and third centuries)
allowed their queens and daughters to sponsor Buddhist activities at Nāgārjunikoṇḍa
and other sites in Andhra Pradesh. But the emperors themselves and the world visions
according to which they shaped their empires were mostly Theist, and the emergent
Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava cosmic stories, the Purāṇas and Epics, supplanted
the Buddhist claims to the command of historical time. The simultaneous Buddhist
epistemological shift away from the command of historical time in their discourse
thus responded to the actual displacement of Buddhist claims to the command of
place in Jambudīpa, the Indian world. Buddhists who made no further claim
to imperial status were welcome participants in a Theist empire. And Buddhists
of this sort did indeed thrive within Indian kingdoms during the Gupta-Vākāṭaka and Pallava-Cālukya imperial formations. Buddhists (both Mahāyāna and "proto-Mahāyāna")
instead claimed primacy in the evaluation of precisely those things that early
Buddhists eschewed and so left to "heretics": essences, eternal entities, soteriological
shortcuts, the nature of the ultimate.'
– Jonathan Walters, 'Buddhist history: the Sri Lankan Pāli vaṃsas and their commentary'
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