The Svetambara scriptural canon used today, the Agamas, descends substantially from the redaction fixed at Valabhi, making the council one of the most consequential events in the textual history of Jainism even though it receives far less attention outside specialist study than events in Mahavira's own life. The written canon it produced allowed for more consistent transmission across widely separated Jain communities in later centuries, reducing the risk of the kind of loss the tradition associates with the famine before the earlier Council of Pataliputra.
The council's authority, like that of Pataliputra before it, is not accepted uniformly across the Jain tradition. Digambara Jainism, holding that the authentic canon had already been lost centuries earlier, does not recognize the Valabhi redaction as a restoration of Mahavira's original teaching, regarding it instead as a Svetambara compilation of what that community had managed to retain and reconstruct, useful as a record of Svetambara belief and practice but not as scripture in the fullest sense the Digambara tradition would require.
For the Svetambara community itself, however, the Valabhi canon has remained the working scriptural foundation for monastic study, ritual and doctrine for more than a millennium and a half, making the council's fourth or fifth century work directly continuous with contemporary Svetambara religious life.