Ananda

Ananda's importance to Buddhism is archival before it is spiritual. As the Buddha's attendant for the last twenty-five years of his life, he heard the great majority of the discourses, and the tradition holds that at the First Council at Rajagaha, convened shortly after the Buddha's death, it was Ananda who recited the suttas from memory, each beginning "Thus have I heard," the formula that still opens the discourses of the Pali Canon. The canon of teaching, in other words, is transmitted through his recollection.

The early accounts are candid about his standing: he had not attained arhatship during the Buddha's life, and the sources describe him reaching it only on the eve of the council, so that he might be admitted. He is also remembered as the advocate who persuaded the Buddha to admit women to the monastic order, founding the bhikkhuni lineage, a role the tradition treats with lasting ambivalence. His gentleness and his prodigious memory are held together as a single virtue: the disciple who preserved rather than the one who pioneered.

Ananda served as the Buddha's cousin and personal attendant and was said to hold perfect retention of everything he heard, which is why the First Council at Rajagaha is remembered as gathering to hear him recite the discourses from memory, the recitation that became the core of the Sutta collection. But the surviving Vinaya accounts of that council do not agree with each other.

Different ordination lineages, Theravada, Sarvastivada and others, preserve different lists of faults for which the assembled elders were said to have censured Ananda: not asking the Buddha to remain for a full aeon, permitting women to view and touch the Buddha's body after death, and several more, with the count and content of the list varying by school. The traditions also differ on how Ananda came to be present at all. Because only an awakened arahant could take part, and Ananda had not yet reached that attainment, several versions describe him striving through the night before the council and awakening only at the last moment, a detail told with different emphasis depending on which school is telling it. The council itself is known only through later canonical narrative rather than any independent record, so historians treat it as much as a story the tradition tells about the authority of its own texts as a report of an event, and the disagreements between schools are read as evidence of that narrative having been reshaped more than once.