The First Council at the Sattapanni Cave

Tradition places the First Buddhist Council at Rajgir in the rainy season immediately following the Buddha's death, in a cave called Sattapanni on the slope above the old city, with the patronage of Ajatashatru. The account has five hundred arhats assembled under the presidency of Mahakassapa, who is said to have proposed the meeting after hearing a monk remark that they were now free of the teacher's rules.

Upali recited the monastic discipline and Ananda recited the discourses, each answering questions about where and to whom a given text had been delivered, and the pattern of those answers is why every discourse opens by naming a place and an audience. Ananda was admitted only after attaining arhatship overnight, and was then charged with a list of minor faults, among them failing to ask the Buddha which of the lesser rules might be dropped, a question the council could not answer and therefore resolved by changing nothing.

Historians treat the council as a later account of how the canon was thought to have been formed rather than as a datable event, since the different schools describe it differently and a full recitation of the material now in the canon could not have taken place in the time allowed. What the story does record reliably is that the community understood its texts to rest on collective memory checked in assembly rather than on a document.