Burma took the work of fixing the text furthest. King Mindon convened what Burmese Buddhism counts as the fifth council at Mandalay, with recitation by around 2,400 monks in 1871, and had the agreed text cut into stone: 729 marble slabs, each housed in its own small white shrine in the grounds of the Kuthodaw Pagoda, an edition that took from 1860 to 1868 to inscribe and is often described as the largest book in the world. Stone was chosen for the reason palm leaf had failed, it does not rot, and it cannot be quietly emended.
The Kuthodaw recension became the working standard until Burma did it again. The sixth council met in a purpose-built cave-shaped hall at Kaba Aye in Yangon from 1954 to 1956, timed to the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's death as Theravada reckons it, and drew monks from Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and India. Its product was a printed critical edition, the Chattha Sangayana text, collating the Burmese manuscripts, the marble slabs and other Asian recensions. That edition, later digitised, is the version most often cited today.
Authority within Theravada is a matter of degree. The Vinaya and the Sutta Pitaka are held to be the Buddha's word. The Abhidhamma is canonical, but its ascription to the Buddha is a Theravada doctrinal position rather than a historical claim other Buddhist schools accept, and the great fifth-century commentator Buddhaghosa, whose Visuddhimagga and running commentaries shape how the canon is actually read, is authoritative without being scripture. Outside Theravada the picture changes again: for most East Asian and Tibetan Buddhists the discourse collections in this basket are genuine but preliminary, superseded in emphasis by the Mahayana sutras that the Pali Canon does not contain.