The Theravada chronicles place this council at Pataliputta in the reign of Ashoka, and the problem it addressed was a consequence of imperial patronage. Royal favour had made the monastic order prosperous, and men had entered it who were not monks in any serious sense, teaching what they pleased and living on the endowments. The tradition says the order could not hold the fortnightly recitation of the rule for years because agreement could not be reached.
Ashoka is said to have sought out the elder Moggaliputta Tissa, who examined the community, expelled those whose views fell outside the teaching, and presided over a recitation of the canon. The Kathavatthu, the Points of Controversy, is attributed to him and to this occasion: a text that sets out and refutes the positions of other schools, and so records what those schools held.
The consequence the chronicles emphasise most is missionary. Nine missions are said to have been sent out after the council, to the Himalayan region, to Gandhara, to the Greek kingdoms of the northwest, to southern India and to Sri Lanka, the last led by Ashoka's son Mahinda. The transmission of the Pali canon to Sri Lanka is the single most consequential of these for the atlas, since the manuscript tradition that preserved the earliest surviving complete Buddhist canon descends from it.