[1][full citation needed] The sutta begins a few days before the rainy retreat when Vassakara, the minister, visited the Buddha in Rajgir on the initiative of Ajātasattu, a king of the Haryanka dynasty of Magadha.
The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta is of utmost historical and cultural value and therefore it has become a sourcebook for students of Buddhism, Buddha biography and history of Buddhist thought and literature.
Hinüber proposes a composition date of no later than 350-320 BCE for this text, which would allow for a "true historical memory" of the events approximately 60 years prior if the short chronology for the Buddha's lifetime is accepted (but also reminds us that such a text was originally intended more as hagiography than as an exact historical record of events).
[6] These narratives of the First Council and found in part or in whole in all six extant Vinaya traditions, whose organization and basic contents are believed by many scholars to stem from before the earliest schisms in the Buddhist Sangha.
[6][7] In some versions, the contents of the Sutta are included before the narrative of the First Council that ends the Skandhaka section of the Vinaya Pitakas.