May 17

Knesset elections brought Menachem Begin's Likud to power for the first time, ending nearly three decades of Labor-led governments.

Anagarika Govinda, born Ernst Lothar Hoffmann in Germany, an early Western expositor of Tibetan Buddhism and author of The Way of the White Clouds, was born in 1898.

The Sixth Buddhist Council, a two-year recension of the Pali canon by monks from eight Theravada countries, opened at the Kaba Aye complex in Yangon in 1954.