Saṃmitīya

The Saṃmitīya was a branch of the Vātsīputrīya, themselves descended from the Sthavira order. Its followers were called personalists: they held that a person, or pudgala, is neither the same as the five aggregates nor different from them, and that this person is what is reborn and reaches nirvāṇa. Other schools attacked the idea as a disguised self.

The school was strongest in Sindh and Gujarat. When Xuanzang travelled in India in the seventh century he found it the largest of the non-Mahāyāna orders, and Yijing, writing in the 690s, reported that its monastic college at Valabhi rivalled Nālandā.

In Sindh, where it held most of the monasteries, the Arab conquest brought Islam and the school lost its base. It lingered in India until Buddhism itself vanished there.