Mahākāśyapa

Mahākāśyapa is named in the early texts as one of the Buddha's chief disciples, foremost in ascetic discipline, and is traditionally said to have convened and presided over the First Council at Rājagaha after the Buddha's death. The historical kernel is that the canon remembers an elder of this name as a leading early figure; beyond that, no reliable biography survives. The later Chan/Zen tradition made him the first 'patriarch' of a mind-to-mind transmission—the famous wordless 'flower sermon'—but that lineage is a retrospective construction of much later centuries, not documented history, and is presented here as tradition.