The syllabus was a survival ranking

Claim (verbatim)

Yijing's Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan (691 CE), written after a decade at Nālandā, preserves the Sanskrit grammar curriculum as a ladder with student ages attached: the Siddham primer, then Pāṇini's sūtras with the dhātu and auxiliary lists, then the Kāśikāvṛtti, then Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya (his "Cūrṇi"), and at the top Bhartṛhari — the Mahābhāṣya commentary and the Vākyapadīya. Copy-demand is enrolment: every beginner needs the primer, few doctors need the summit, so Sanskrit survival should be monotonic on curriculum position. The tradition itself remembered the danger at the top — the Vākyapadīya's closing history of grammar mourns Vyāḍi's Saṃgraha, the legendary summit treatise, as already gone, and records that the Mahābhāṣya itself once dwindled to book-only survival in the South. The ladder Yijing climbed should now read as a survival gradient: mass witnesses at the bottom, a single codex near the top, nothing above. Prediction: scoring each rung of Yijing's ladder by extant Sanskrit witnesses, survival will decrease monotonically across three tiers — the Aṣṭādhyāyī and Kāśikāvṛtti in the hundreds of witnesses, the Mahābhāṣya and Vākyapadīya at least tenfold fewer, Bhartṛhari's Mahābhāṣya commentary (the Dīpikā) surviving in exactly one incomplete manuscript, and the remembered summit (Vyāḍi's Saṃgraha) in zero (primary clause: strict tier-wise monotone decrease with the Dīpikā at a single witness; the verdict follows it). Kill: J. Takakusu's translation of Yijing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Clarendon, 1896), chapter 34, for the curriculum; witness counts from the New Catalogus Catalogorum (University of Madras) and the NGMCP catalogue; and the single-codex Mahābhāṣyadīpikā as published in the BORI critical edition (1985-1991).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: scoring each rung of Yijing's ladder by extant Sanskrit witnesses, survival will decrease monotonically across three tiers — the Aṣṭādhyāyī and Kāśikāvṛtti in the hundreds of witnesses, the Mahābhāṣya and Vākyapadīya at least tenfold fewer, Bhartṛhari's Mahābhāṣya commentary (the Dīpikā) surviving in exactly one incomplete manuscript, and the remembered summit (Vyāḍi's Saṃgraha) in zero (primary clause: strict tier-wise monotone decrease with the Dīpikā at a single witness; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: J. Takakusu's translation of Yijing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Clarendon, 1896), chapter 34, for the curriculum; witness counts from the New Catalogus Catalogorum (University of Madras) and the NGMCP catalogue; and the single-codex Mahābhāṣyadīpikā as published in the BORI critical edition (1985-1991).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Yijing's curriculum ladder (Takakusu ch. 34) and the endpoint facts are all published — the Mahabhasyadipika's survival in a single incomplete manuscript, the lost Samgraha of Vyadi, and the tradition's memory of the Mahabhasya's own near-loss (discussed by Bronkhorst). The monotone witness-count gradient across the whole curriculum has never been tabulated as a survival test.

• J. Takakusu, A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Clarendon, 1896), ch. 34
• J. Bronkhorst, 'On the History of Paninian Grammar in the Early Centuries Following Patanjali', Journal of Indian Philosophy 11 (1983)

Predictions

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