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Triangulating the drowned ocean
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“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Guṇāḍhya's Bṛhatkathā — the vast lost story-ocean in Paiśācī — survives only through its descendants: two eleventh-century Kashmiri verse abridgements (Kṣemendra's Bṛhatkathāmañjarī, c. 1037, and Somadeva's Kathāsaritsāgara, c. 1070), the earlier Nepalese Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha of Budhasvāmin, the Jain Vasudevahiṇḍi of Saṅghadāsa, the Tamil Peruṅkatai — plus a Sanskrit rendering credited to the Gaṅga king Durvinīta in copper-plate praśastis, attested and itself lost. Lacôte's Essai (1908) argued that the two Kashmiris worked not from Guṇāḍhya but from a shared Kashmiri intermediary. That hypothesis has an order signature: descent through a common intermediary locks shared structure, so the two Kashmiri texts should agree on the sequence of shared episodes far beyond either one's agreement with Budhasvāmin — and lost-text philology becomes a computable stemma problem on surviving witnesses. Prediction: aligning the narrative episodes shared across the Kathāsaritsāgara, the Bṛhatkathāmañjarī, and the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha, the rank correlation of episode order between the two Kashmiri texts will exceed each one's correlation with Budhasvāmin's text by at least 0.3 Kendall's tau, and no substantial shared block will show a Kashmiri text siding with Budhasvāmin on order against the other Kashmiri (primary clause: the tau gap of at least 0.3; the verdict follows it). Kill: the printed editions and e-texts — the Kathāsaritsāgara (Durgāprasād's Nirṇaya Sāgara edition; GRETIL e-text), the Bṛhatkathāmañjarī (Kāvyamālā edition), and Budhasvāmin's Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (Lacôte's edition; Mallinson's Clay Sanskrit Library text, The Emperor of the Sorcerers, 2005) — with the episode concordances in Lacôte's Essai sur Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā (1908) as the alignment baseline.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: aligning the narrative episodes shared across the Kathāsaritsāgara, the Bṛhatkathāmañjarī, and the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha, the rank correlation of episode order between the two Kashmiri texts will exceed each one's correlation with Budhasvāmin's text by at least 0.3 Kendall's tau, and no substantial shared block will show a Kashmiri text siding with Budhasvāmin on order against the other Kashmiri (primary clause: the tau gap of at least 0.3; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the printed editions and e-texts — the Kathāsaritsāgara (Durgāprasād's Nirṇaya Sāgara edition; GRETIL e-text), the Bṛhatkathāmañjarī (Kāvyamālā edition), and Budhasvāmin's Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (Lacôte's edition; Mallinson's Clay Sanskrit Library text, The Emperor of the Sorcerers, 2005) — with the episode concordances in Lacôte's Essai sur Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā (1908) as the alignment baseline.
Browse the registry: Digitized texts →
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- South Asia; Medieval Tagged by Claude (Opus 4.8)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 100 BCE – 1100 CE Brhatkatha stemma: Gunadhya's lost original (disputed, trad. c.1st c. BCE-1st c. CE Satavahana milieu) through the Kashmiri Kathasaritsagara (c.1070) and Brhatkathamanjari (1037); Lacote's 1908 Essai/GRETIL are instruments. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Philology, editions & stemmatics lost Brhatkatha reconstructed via stemmatic comparison of descendant versions Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Lost literary works the object is a lost story-collection reconstructed from its descendants Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim the prediction is an episode-order agreement statistic among descendant witnesses of a lost text, a transmission claim Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Assigned
- Stemmatics: reconstructing transmission trees from shared error the test is a stemma problem: shared order between two witnesses against a third is read as descent through a common intermediary Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Digitized texts; Published editions the printed editions and Lacote's episode concordances carry the alignment, with the GRETIL e-text supplying machine-readable Kathasaritsagara Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, breadth wave weighting India/South Asia by inferred textual production rather than survival; every item grounded in real works, authors, catalogues, and testimonia, including the real evidence of loss (citing authors, catalogue entries, translation corpora, rediscovery cases); no fabricated citations.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Lacote's shared-Kashmiri-intermediary hypothesis is the classic position, and the qualitative comparison of the three versions' arrangements (the two Kashmiris against Budhasvamin) was worked through by Lacote and Speyer. No one has quantified episode-order concordance as a rank-correlation test across the three witnesses.
Sources cited by the triage
- F. Lacote, Essai sur Gunadhya et la Brhatkatha (Paris, 1908)
- J.S. Speyer, Studies about the Kathasaritsagara (Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Amsterdam, 1908)
Predictions
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