The Loṅkā-gaccha was not founded by Loṅkā himself, but by his first disciple, Bhāṇa, who initiated himself and 45 followers of Loṅkā’s doctrine. This happened some time between 1471 and 1476. The new Loṅkā-gaccha took the 'five great vows', mahā-vrata, of the Jain monks and nuns.
From the 16th century until the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of the order is that of successive splits creating many subgroups. Most of them comprised an intermediate category of lay-ascetics called yati, who did not accept all of the monastic vows and returned to worshipping images.
The tradition now known as Sthānaka-vāsins derives from five monks who separately split from different lines of the Loṅkā-gaccha tradition during the 16th and 17th centuries.