The Two-Year Recitation of the Buddhist Canon
From 1954 to 1956 in Yangon, 2,500 monks chanted the entire Pali Canon from memory to verify the text.
The Sixth Buddhist Council convened in Yangon, Burma on 17 May 1954 and closed on 24 May 1956. Its formal goal was to recite, compare, and certify the Pali Tipitaka — the three-basket canon of Theravada Buddhism — across the manuscript traditions of Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, India, Pakistan, and Nepal.
The Burmese government built a hall for the purpose: the Mahapasana Guha, an artificial cave on the slope of Kabar Aye Pagoda hill in northern Yangon, large enough to seat 10,000 people. The shape was modeled on the Sattapanni Cave in India where the First Council was traditionally held shortly after the Buddha's death. Construction began in 1952.
Approximately 2,500 monks took part. The recitation was organized as a ritualized cross-check: a vissajjaka (answerer) would chant a section, and a pucchaka (questioner) would prompt the next, with editors comparing the result against printed and manuscript editions. Disagreements were resolved by majority and noted in margins. The full canon — roughly forty volumes in modern print — was covered.
The council was timed to fall on the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's parinibbana, calculated from the traditional Theravada date of 544 BCE. The certified Pali edition produced afterward, the Chattha Sangayana edition, became the standard text for much of the Theravada world and is the source for most digital Pali corpora today, including the freely available Vipassana Research Institute database.
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