The Fifth Buddhist Council

By the middle of the nineteenth century King Mindon of Burma was ruling a kingdom that had already lost two wars to the British and most of its coastline with them. Upper Burma was what remained. He moved his capital to Mandalay, built it new, and set about the works a Buddhist king is expected to perform, of which the largest was a council.

The council itself did what Buddhist councils do: the Pali canon was recited and its text agreed. What made this one different was what happened to the agreed text. It was set down on marble. Seven hundred and twenty-nine slabs were inscribed and each was housed in its own small white stupa at the Kuthodaw Pagoda at the foot of Mandalay Hill, laid out in ranks so that the whole canon stands in a walled enclosure that a reader can walk through.

The motive was preservation of a very literal kind. Palm leaf manuscripts rot in a monsoon climate and have to be recopied every few generations; monastery libraries burn; and a king watching British power move up the Irrawaddy had reason to think that the institutions which did the recopying might not survive. Stone does not need a monastery.

He was right about the danger and the precaution worked. Mandalay fell in 1885, the Konbaung dynasty ended, and Burma became a province of British India. The slabs are still standing, still legible, and still visited, which is more than can be said for the kingdom that raised them.

Burma counts this the fifth Buddhist council. Saying so takes a position, and it is worth being clear about what the position is, because a number that looks like a neutral fact is doing work here.

To be the fifth, this gathering has to stand in a line whose first four are the assembly after the Buddha's death, the assembly at Vesali, the assembly under Ashoka, and the writing down of the canon in Sri Lanka. That is the Theravada line as the Sri Lankan chronicles tell it, and Burma had inherited it along with the canon. Adding a fifth to it is a claim about continuity: that a Burmese king in 1871 is doing the same thing an Indian emperor did in the third century before the common era, and doing it with the same authority.

The other Theravada countries did not all take the number up. Sri Lanka and Thailand had their own royal recensions and their own claims to be the guardian of the canon, and none of these traditions had an authority above them that could rule on whose count was correct, because Buddhism has never had one.

None of this makes the council less real or the slabs less remarkable. It does mean that when a source says the fifth council, the useful next question is whose fifth. The atlas records the ordinal as the label a particular tradition uses and describes the assembly by what it did, which is the only way to hold several traditions at once without silently adopting one of them.