Jain tradition describes a council held at Pataliputra, in present day Patna, around 300 BCE, convened in response to a severe famine that had scattered the monastic community across northern India and put the oral transmission of Mahavira's teaching at serious risk. With many senior monks who had memorized portions of the canon dead or dispersed, the surviving community is said to have gathered to pool what each monk could still recall and compile it into a more fixed form.
The council is traditionally associated with Bhadrabahu, a senior monk of the period remembered in Jain accounts as one of the last to hold complete knowledge of a body of scripture called the Purvas, older texts that later tradition holds were gradually lost as fewer monks could master their full content. Accounts describe the compilation effort at Pataliputra as partial and incomplete even at the time, an early sign of the transmission difficulties that would continue to affect the Jain canon for centuries afterward.
The council's work did not produce a single settled canon accepted by the whole Jain community, and later redactions, including the Council of Valabhi centuries afterward, continued the same basic project of consolidating and fixing scripture that had proved difficult to complete in one sitting.