The Question Nobody Could Answer at Rajagaha

The Buddha, according to the Cullavagga's own account, left his monastic community an unusual piece of unfinished business on his deathbed: permission to abolish the lesser and minor rules of training, if the order wished, without ever specifying which rules he meant by that phrase. His attendant Ananda, who had been present at the Buddha's final teachings, admitted at the First Council convened soon afterward at Rajagaha that he had simply failed to ask for clarification at the time, leaving several hundred assembled monks to work out for themselves which of their many rules counted as lesser and minor and which did not.

The assembly could not agree. Some argued for abolishing a broad range of rules under the permission they believed the Buddha had granted; others wanted to keep everything exactly as it stood, unwilling to guess at a boundary the Teacher himself had never drawn. It was, in effect, a dispute about interpretive authority conducted in the immediate aftermath of losing the one figure whose authority nobody present could question, and the Council needed a resolution before the recitation of the full monastic code, already underway under the elder Upali's guidance, could be treated as settled and complete.