The various accounts of “within twenty years of the Awakening”

Several passages in the later commentaries and in the Chinese Vinaya treatises take the twentieth year after the Awakening as a dividing line. The commentaries of the Southern tradition say that in those twenty years no smoke or fire was made in the monastics' dwellings, as the Buddha had not yet allowed monastics to heat water; that the Buddha mostly stayed at the various shrines of Vesālī; and that the attendant Nāgasamāla, like Upavāṇa, Nāgita and Meghiya, was an attendant of this period. The Chinese Shelifu wen jing (Sutra of Sāriputta's Questions) says that in the first twenty years of the Buddha's life as a Buddha the disciples had no regular support, and only after twenty years did regular support become plentiful; the Chinese Sapoduo pini piposha (Sarvāstivāda Vinaya Vibhāṣā) and Da fangbian fo bao'en jing say that Ānanda had not heard with his own ears the Dhamma the Buddha taught in the first twenty years. Source text