The Man Who Remembered, and the Council That Almost Excluded Him

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.