text: Language A consensus has grown in scholarship which sees the first wave of Buddhist missionary work as associated with the Gāndhārī language and the Kharoṣṭhī script and tentatively with the Dharmaguptaka sect. However, there is evidence that other sects and traditions of Buddhism also used Gāndhārī, and further evidence that the Dharmaguptaka sect also used Sanskrit at times:
  Starting in the first century of the Common Era, there was a large trend toward a type of Gāndhārī which was heavily Sanskritized.
  History
  In Northwest India
  The Gandharan Buddhist texts, the earliest Buddhist texts ever discovered, are apparently dedicated to the teachers of the Dharmaguptaka school. They tend to confirm a flourishing of the Dharmaguptaka school in northwestern India around the 1st century CE, with Gāndhārī as the canonical language, and this would explain the subsequent influence of the Dharmaguptakas in Central Asia and then northeastern Asia. According to Buddhist scholar A. K. Warder, the Dharmaguptaka originated in Aparānta.
  According to one scholar, the evidence afforded by the Gandharan Buddhist texts "suggest[s] that the Dharmaguptaka sect achieved early success under their Indo-Scythian supporters in Gandhāra, but that the sect subsequently declined with the rise of the Kuṣāṇa Empire (ca. mid-first to third century A.D.), which gave its patronage to the Sarvāstivāda sect."
  In Central Asia
  Available evidence indicates that the first Buddhist missions to Khotan were carried out by the Dharmaguptaka sect: