The Sixth Council and the Cave Hall

The Sixth Buddhist Council opened at Yangon in May 1954 and closed in May 1956, timed to fall on the twenty five hundredth anniversary of the Buddha's passing as Burmese reckoning counts it. It met in the Maha Pasana Guha, a great cave hall built for the purpose on the northern edge of the city near the Kaba Aye Pagoda, an artificial cavern raised in deliberate imitation of the Sattapanni cave in which the first council is said to have been held. Around two and a half thousand monks took part, with delegations from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos as well as Burma, and the work consisted of reciting and comparing the whole Pali Canon against the editions current in the different Theravada countries, in sessions that ran for two years. The result, the Chattha Sangayana edition, is the text Burmese Theravada treats as authoritative and is the base of several modern digital editions used worldwide.

The council was sponsored by U Nu's government, and the state's involvement was as visible as the monastic one, which is one reason it is not universally counted a council in the same sense as the first three. Whether a gathering convened by a state and confined largely to one lineage carries the authority of those earlier assemblies is a question the Theravada world has never wholly agreed on.