Yangon

The Shwedagon Pagoda stands on Singuttara Hill above Yangon, a bell shaped stupa plated in gold with a crown of gem set finials, surrounded by a terrace of shrines, planetary posts and smaller stupas that a visitor walks clockwise. Burmese tradition holds that two merchant brothers, Tapussa and Bhallika, met the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment, received eight hairs from his head, and brought them home, where they were enshrined on the hill together with relics of the three Buddhas who preceded him in this world age.

Historians date the structure in its present form to rebuilding campaigns from the fifteenth century onward, with the height raised repeatedly by royal patrons; Queen Shin Sawbu is credited with giving her own weight in gold. Worshippers pour water over the small Buddha image at the planetary post of the weekday on which they were born, a practice that ties a personal horoscope to the fixed geography of the terrace. The pagoda has also been a political place for as long as Burma has had modern politics. Aung San addressed a mass meeting on its western stairway in 1946, students gathered at its steps in the rising of 1988, and the monks who marched in September 2007 in what became known outside the country as the saffron revolution set out from it.

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.