The First Buddhist Council

The Buddha left no written text and appointed no successor, saying that the teaching and the discipline would be the teacher after him. The tradition holds that in the rains retreat following his death five hundred arahants gathered at Rajagaha under the presidency of Mahakassapa to establish what he had actually said, before memories diverged and before anyone could claim whatever suited them.

The account describes a division of labour that still shows in the texts. Upali recited the monastic rule, because he was held to be the foremost in discipline, and Ananda, who had been the Buddha's attendant for decades and had heard almost everything, recited the discourses. This is why the discourses open with the formula thus have I heard: they are presented as Ananda's testimony, delivered at this council, rather than as anonymous scripture.

Two details in the traditional account are more interesting than a smooth story would allow. Ananda is said to have attained arahantship only on the eve of the council, having been excluded until he did, and to have been rebuked afterwards over several minor matters. And the elder Purana, arriving later with his own company, declined to accept the recension, saying he would continue to remember the teaching as he had heard it from the Buddha himself. A council convened to fix the tradition recorded, in its own account, a monk who would not be bound by it.

The council is described in the Vinaya of several schools and in later chronicles, all compiled a long time after the events they narrate, and all with an interest in the outcome, since a canon agreed by five hundred arahants immediately after the founder's death is the strongest possible warrant for the texts a school holds. Scholars have treated the account with corresponding caution.

The doubts are specific rather than general. The number five hundred is a conventional figure. The idea that the whole of the discourse and discipline collections as they now stand could have been recited and agreed in a single rains retreat is difficult, given their length. The versions preserved by different schools disagree on details, including which texts were recited and what happened to Ananda. And the second council at Vesali, a century later over ten disputed monastic practices, is generally regarded as better attested than the first.

What the doubts do not touch is the practice that lies behind the story. Early Buddhist communities did transmit their texts by communal recitation, they did organise them for memorisation with the repetitions and formulas that make the discourses distinctive on the page, and groups of reciters specialised in particular collections. Whether or not one formal assembly took place at Rajagaha, the method the account describes is how these texts were actually preserved for several centuries before anyone wrote them down.