The Khandhaka moves beyond the Suttavibhanga's individual rules of personal conduct into the organizational machinery required to run a growing monastic institution, covering, across its Mahavagga and Cullavagga sections, the procedures for ordaining new monks and nuns, the conduct of the fortnightly uposatha observance at which the Patimokkha rules are recited communally, the annual three month rains retreat during which wandering ascetics settle in one place, and detailed regulations on robes, dwellings, food, medicine and the resolution of disputes within the community. Its opening chapters of the Mahavagga narrate, in continuous story form rather than as bare regulation, the period immediately following the Buddha's enlightenment, his first sermon, the ordination of his earliest disciples, and the gradual growth of the sangha, giving this division a narrative, biographical quality closer to the suttas than to the more technical Suttavibhanga.
The Cullavagga closes the division with an account of the two earliest and most consequential councils in Buddhist history, the First Council convened shortly after the Buddha's death to formally recite and fix the teaching and the monastic rules, and the Second Council roughly a century later, convened specifically to resolve a dispute over ten points of monastic practice that some monks considered legitimate relaxations and others considered clear violations.