What is known about the Council of Pataliputra comes almost entirely from later Svetambara sources, and the event occupies an uneasy place in Jain historiography as a result. Digambara tradition does not accept that any authentic version of the old canon, including the Purvas the council is said to have tried to preserve, survived into the present at all, holding instead that the original teaching was effectively lost after Mahavira's death regardless of any compilation effort made at Pataliputra or afterward. From a Digambara perspective, the council's later reputation as a successful, if partial, rescue of the canon is itself part of a Svetambara narrative the tradition does not share.
Because the only detailed accounts of the council come from one side of a divide that had not yet fully hardened at the time the events are said to have occurred, historians are cautious about treating the traditional narrative, including its precise date, its association with Bhadrabahu, and the scale of what was actually accomplished, as established fact rather than as later communal memory shaped by the interests of the tradition that preserved it.
The council remains useful nonetheless as an early marker of the transmission anxiety that runs through the whole history of the Jain canon, a concern that resurfaces explicitly at the later Council of Valabhi, when the Svetambara community finally committed its scripture to writing.