Which Buddhist council was not held in Bihar?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Fourth. The first three councils all met inside what is now Bihar; the fourth did not, on either of the two accounts that survive of it. The Sarvastivada tradition places the Fourth Council in Kashmir, convened by the Kushan emperor Kanishka I at the Kundalvana vihara — a site usually placed around Harwan near Srinagar — after he sought the advice of the elder Parsva; the Theravada tradition places a quite different Fourth Council in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, at the Alu Vihara, also called Aloka Lena, under King Vattagamani Abhaya, and it is to that assembly that the writing down of the Pali canon is credited. Kashmir or Sri Lanka: either way, not Bihar. That is what makes this an unusually forgiving question — a candidate who has learnt only one of the two Fourth Councils still answers it correctly. Now the three that were in Bihar. The First Council met at a cave near Rajagriha, modern Rajgir in Nalanda district, immediately after the Buddha's parinirvana, with the support of King Ajatashatru and under the presidency of Mahakassapa; Ananda recited the discourses and Upali the monastic rules. The Second Council met a century later at the Valukarama in Vaishali, in north Bihar, under King Kalashoka. The Third Council met at Pataliputra — Patna — the Mauryan capital, convened by Ashoka and led by the elder Moggaliputta Tissa. One caveat that a serious student should carry: modern scholarship questions the historicity of these councils, or at least the accounts we have of them, and treats the Theravada version of the Third and the Sarvastivada version of the Fourth as partisan. The exam is testing the received tradition, and within that tradition the answer is unambiguous. It also helps to see the spacing between them, because the gaps are what move the geography. The First follows the Buddha's death immediately. The Second comes a full century later, by which time the discipline has drifted far enough to need arbitration. The Third belongs to Ashoka's reign, when royal patronage had become large enough to attract people into the order for the wrong reasons. Only then does the fourth arrive, in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka and in the Kushan period in Kashmir, by which point there is no longer one sangha to summon and so no longer one place to summon it to. Read that way, the question is not really about four venues at all. It is asking whether you can translate three ancient names — Rajagriha, Vaishali, Pataliputra — into the modern map of Bihar, and then notice that the fourth name on the list has no equivalent there.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The First Council was held in Bihar. It met at a cave near Rajagriha, today's Rajgir in Nalanda district, in the year following the Buddha's parinirvana, with King Ajatashatru of Magadha as patron and Mahakassapa presiding; Ananda recited the Suttas, Upali the Vinaya, and the assembly resolved unanimously to keep every rule intact even though the Buddha had allowed the minor ones to be dropped. Candidates who fix the parinirvana at Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh sometimes assume the council that followed it stayed there.  (b) The Second Council was held in Bihar, at the Valukarama in Vaishali, a hundred years after the parinirvana and under the patronage of King Kalashoka. It was called after the monk Yasa Kakandakaputta objected to ten lax practices of the Vajjiputtaka monks — the dasa vatthuni, of which the tenth and gravest was accepting gold and silver — and the ten points were declared invalid. Tradition dates the first schism of the sangha to this dispute. Vaishali reads as a generic ancient-India name to many candidates, but it is a Bihar district.  (c) The Third Council was held in Bihar, at Pataliputra — the Mauryan capital, today's Patna — convened by Ashoka and led by the elder Moggaliputta Tissa with about a thousand monks. Its purpose was to purge the order of opportunists drawn in by royal patronage, it settled that the Buddha was a Vibhajjavadin, a Teacher of Analysis, and it added the Kathavatthu to the canon. The pull towards a wrong answer here is Ashoka's association with Sanchi, Sarnath and Kalinga rather than with his own capital.

Concept: A Buddhist council is a sangiti, literally a reciting together: an assembly of the monastic community called to fix what the Buddha had actually taught and how the order should live, at moments when the answer had become contested. The first three sit inside a single political geography. Magadha was the dominant power of the eastern Gangetic plain, and each of these councils was called under the protection of a Magadhan or Mauryan king — Ajatashatru at Rajagriha, Kalashoka at Vaishali, Ashoka at Pataliputra — which is precisely why all three met in what is now Bihar. Each produced something the tradition still uses: the First recited the Sutta and Vinaya collections and refused to relax a single rule; the Second rejected the ten lax practices of the Vaishali monks and is remembered as the moment the sangha first split, into Sthaviravada and Mahasanghika; the Third produced the Kathavatthu and, in the Theravada account, launched the missions that carried Buddhism to Sri Lanka and beyond. By the time of the fourth, that unity was gone. Buddhism had fragmented into regional schools with regional patrons, so there is no single Fourth Council at all — the Sarvastivadins of the north-west held one under Kanishka in Kashmir, and the Theravadins of the south held their own in Sri Lanka, where the oral canon was finally written down. The series did not stop there: a Fifth Council was held in 1871 and a Sixth in 1954, both in Myanmar.

State PCS 2025 Q95 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q95 — History PYQ with Answer