This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Buddhist Councils gathers eight gatherings the tradition itself counts inconsistently, the same word covering assemblies that settled doctrine, assemblies that only fixed a canon in writing, and at least two competing claims to being the fourth.
The First Council at Rajagaha, where five hundred arahants under Mahakassapa are said to have recited and agreed the Buddha's teaching after his death, Ananda the discourses and Upali the monastic rule, is Buddhism's own origin story for its canon, though scholars differ on how much of the account is history and how much a later charter. The Second Council at Vesali, settling whether ten relaxations of monastic rule were lawful, is more mundane and more securely historical for exactly that reason. The Third Council at Pataliputta under Ashoka and Moggaliputta Tissa, credited with sending the mission that carried the Pali canon to Sri Lanka, survives only in Theravada sources, which is why its scope is debated.
The numbering splits hardest at four: Theravada gives that number to the Sri Lankan council at Aluvihare that first wrote the Pali canon down, while northern tradition gives it instead to a separate council under the Kushan king Kanishka in Kashmir that fixed the Sarvastivada Abhidharma, a council Theravada does not recognise at all. Burma's own Fifth Council under King Mindon and its mid nineteen fifties Sixth Council at Yangon, whose text most modern editions descend from, continue a specifically Burmese sequence. The Council of Lhasa stands outside the numbered series entirely, the eighth century Samye debate between Indian and Chinese positions on awakening that anchors Tibetan Buddhism's alignment with India.