This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Jain Councils gathers three attempts to fix a canon that kept slipping away from the community that carried it, and the story they tell together is of a scripture the two great branches of Jainism now hold in entirely different forms, because they trust different councils.
The Jain Council of Pataliputra, traditionally held under Sthulabhadra about three centuries after Mahavira, tried to fix the canon after a famine had scattered the community and broken its memorised transmission. Svetambara tradition records that eleven of the twelve Angas were recovered and that the twelfth, the Drstivada, was not; Digambara tradition does not accept the recension at all, holding that the original canon was already lost, and the two communities have had different scriptures ever since. The Council of Mathura, held later at Mathura, recited and set in order a canon that had again grown scattered, under the elder Skandila; it is one of two recensions the Svetambara tradition remembers from the same period, and their relationship to each other has never been fully worked out.
The Council of Valabhi, held in Gujarat under Devarddhigani Kshamashramana, finally committed the Svetambara Agamas to writing after centuries of oral transmission, though Jain tradition itself gives two dates for it, 453 and 466 CE, sources never reconciled. That redaction produced the Svetambara canon in substantially the form it still holds today, and the Digambaras do not recognise it, so the same three councils that tried to rescue one scripture ended by fixing two.