REYES (Render Everything You've Ever Seen) has been the basis of PRMan since the start. Recently PRMan has shifted away from this approach and towards more ray tracing.
see the following for descriptions of REYES:
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/reyes-renderman-under-the-ho...
or the 1987 paper by Cook, Carpenter and Catmul
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf