This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Buddhist teaching holds, as one of its most distinctive claims, that there is no fixed, unchanging self behind the five aggregates that make up a person: not-self, anatta. The Pudgalavada schools, chiefly the Vatsiputriya and its later Sammitiya offshoot, accepted that teaching and then asked a question it left uncomfortably open: if there is truly no person at all, whose memory persists from moment to moment, whose karma ripens across a lifetime, and who is reborn into the next one.
Their answer proposed a pudgala, a person, that is neither simply identical to the five aggregates nor entirely separate from them, a narrow formulation meant to carry the continuity Buddhist teaching needs, karma, memory, rebirth, without smuggling back in the fixed self the earlier teaching had ruled out.
Rival schools were not persuaded the formulation succeeded. The Sarvastivada, and later the philosopher Vasubandhu, argued that any person real in the sense Pudgalavada proposed simply is the fixed self anatta denies, dressed in cautious language rather than avoided. Vasubandhu's refutation, appended to his major work on Buddhist philosophy, is among the most sustained doxographical arguments against a single position to survive from classical Buddhist scholarship.
The school's own texts did not survive the argument: nothing of its scriptural corpus remains complete today, and its position is known mainly through the refutations of opponents who wrote against it. That the school was nonetheless substantial is independently attested: the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, travelling through India in the seventh century, recorded Sammitiya monasteries among the more populous Buddhist institutions he encountered, centuries after rival schools had judged the position heterodox.