A Story:
There is a story in the Buddhist world, of an old monk who lived in the Buddha’s community at the time of the Buddha’s death. As the story is told by the Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka, after Buddha passed away, this monk was openly happy, saying, “Now that the old man’s not around, we won’t have to stick to all his rules.” (The monastic order had a lot of rules.) This was overheard by one of the senior, enlightened monks, who realized that unless the Buddha’s teachings were recorded and remembered, the order would break down and the usefulness of Buddhism lost. So he helped initiate a convocation of the most senior monks, to remember and record (in memory) the teachings. And this senior monk was so grateful to the old monk.