Buddhist councils

The first council

Tradition places a council at Rajagriha immediately after the Buddha's death, at which five hundred arahants assembled under Mahakassapa. Ananda recited the discourses and Upali the discipline, establishing the canon in its oral form.

Historians treat the account with reserve: it appears in texts composed long afterwards, its numbers are formulaic, and a full recitation of the canon as it now stands would have been impossible in the time described. That some gathering took place to fix what had been taught is plausible.

The second council

A council at Vaishali about a century later addressed ten disputed points of monastic practice, including whether monks might accept gold and silver. The strict position prevailed, and the resulting disagreement is generally taken to be the occasion of the first division in the sangha, between the Sthaviras and the Mahasanghikas.

This council is more securely attested than the first, and both surviving Vinaya traditions record it.

The third council

Tradition, in the Theravada account, places a third council at Pataliputra under Ashoka, convened by the elder Moggaliputta Tissa to expel monks holding wrong views and to settle doctrine, after which missions were dispatched to surrounding regions including Sri Lanka.

Only the Theravada sources record it, which has led some scholars to treat it as a sectarian account of a school-specific event rather than a general council.

Later

A fourth council is recorded in the Sarvastivada tradition under Kanishka in Kashmir, associated with the compilation of the Mahavibhasha, and separately in Sri Lanka, where the canon was committed to writing. Further councils were held in Burma in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fifth inscribing the canon on marble slabs at Mandalay and the sixth convened at Rangoon in 1954.