One of the major groups within the Eighteen Schools of Early Buddhism. It emerged around the late 1st century bce as a subschool of the parent Vātsīputrīyas, who in their turn were an off-shoot of the early Sthavira school. Like their parent group, the Sammitīyas advocated a form of pudgala-vāda, a belief in the substantial (though temporary) reality of the individual.
Sammitiya
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The Sammitiya sect was an offshoot of the Vatsiputriya and one of twenty or so early schools of Buddhism in India. Like its predecessor, it claims the person (Sanskrit: pudgala) as a carrier of skandhas endures.
The distinguished Buddhologist Etienne Lamotte, using the writings of the Chinese traveler Xuanzang, asserted that the Sammitiya were in all likelihood the most populous non-Mahayanist sect in India, comprising double the number of the next largest sect,[1] although scholar L. S. Cousins revised his estimate down to a quarter of all non-Mahayana monks, still the largest overall.[2] The Sammitiya sect seems to have been particularly strong in the Sindh, where one scholar estimates 350 Buddhist monasteries were Sammitiya of a total of 450.[3] This area was rapidly Islamized in the wake of the Arab conquest.[4]
Xuanzang reported that the Sammitiya of Sind “have narrow views and attack the Mahayana,[5] while the Tibetan historian Taranatha reported that the Sammitiya were staunchly anti-Mahayanist and anti-Vajrayanist, with Sammitiya monks from the Sind burning tantric scriptures and destroying a silver image of Hevajra at Vajrasana monastery.[6]
The end of the Sammitya sect appears to coincide with the overall decline of Buddhism in India.
Notes
- ^ Lamotte, Etienne. History of Indian Buddhism. 1988. pg 539-544
- ^ "Person and the Self." Buddhism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, Vol. 2, pgs 84-101
- ^ Religion and Society in Arab Sind by Maclean, Derryl. Brill: Leiden 1989. pg 154
- ^ Religion and Society in Arab Sind by Maclean, Derryl. Brill: Leiden 1989
- ^ Xuanzang. She-Kia-Feng-Che 1959: 120; Cf. Xuanzang 1884 vol 2:273
- ^ Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India, translated by Lama Chimpa Alaka Chattopadhyaya. pg 279
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