  One group of Buddhist philosophers, the Pudgalavādins (lit.  personalists), usually identified with the  Vātsīputrīyas, seem to have advocated the view that  persons can be said to conventionally exist, insofar as they are  conceived in dependence upon the five aggregates and the six types of cognitive awareness (cf. Priestley 1999). The Pudgalavādins took persons to be as real as the collection of aggregates and regarded  them as neither identical nor different from the aggregates. Direct  accounts of the Pudgalavāda doctrine survive primarily in the  critiques of their opponents (and in three short texts preserved only in Chinese and in the  Saṃmitīyanikāyaśāstra).