The atheists die twice

Claim (verbatim)

The Cārvāka/Lokāyata school is the subcontinent's best-documented total textual loss: a sūtra text attributed to Bṛhaspati and a real commentarial profession — Aviddhakarṇa, Bhāvivikta, Purandara, and Udbhaṭa are cited by name, with prose quotations, in their opponents' works (Śāntarakṣita's Tattvasaṃgraha with Kamalaśīla's Pañjikā; Cakradhara's Granthibhaṅga on the Nyāyamañjarī) — while the lone surviving school text is Jayarāśi's deviant Tattvopaplavasiṃha. The school died twice: first the books, then the memory that there had been books, leaving late doxography (Mādhava's Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha, fourteenth century) to recycle a fixed stock of hedonist verses. A two-stage death is datable: the fragment corpus should show a cliff after which no polemicist demonstrates independent access to Cārvāka prose, because by then refutation was quoting refutation. Prediction: dating every fragment-bearing citer in the assembled Cārvāka fragment corpus, no independent prose citation naming a Cārvāka commentator will postdate 1300, while citers before 1200 supply at least three distinct named commentators with verbatim prose (primary clause: zero independent post-1300 named-prose citations; the verdict follows it). Kill: the fragment collection in Ramkrishna Bhattacharya's "Cārvāka Fragments: A New Collection" (Journal of Indian Philosophy 30, 2002; expanded in Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, 2009), checked against the Tattvasaṃgraha with Pañjikā (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), Jayarāśi's Tattvopaplavasiṃha (GOS 87, 1940), and Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha chapter 1.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: dating every fragment-bearing citer in the assembled Cārvāka fragment corpus, no independent prose citation naming a Cārvāka commentator will postdate 1300, while citers before 1200 supply at least three distinct named commentators with verbatim prose (primary clause: zero independent post-1300 named-prose citations; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the fragment collection in Ramkrishna Bhattacharya's "Cārvāka Fragments: A New Collection" (Journal of Indian Philosophy 30, 2002; expanded in Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, 2009), checked against the Tattvasaṃgraha with Pañjikā (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), Jayarāśi's Tattvopaplavasiṃha (GOS 87, 1940), and Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha chapter 1.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Bhattacharya's fragment collection — the conjecture's own kill source — already establishes the two-stage death: some thirty prose fragments from four named commentators (Aviddhakarna, Purandara, Udbhata, Kambalasvatara), all supplied by citers working before c. 1200, and his published conclusion that all Carvaka texts and commentaries were lost after the twelfth century, with Madhava and later doxographers quoting at second hand from a fixed verse stock. Both halves of the prediction are his published findings.

• R. Bhattacharya, 'Carvaka Fragments: A New Collection', Journal of Indian Philosophy 30.6 (2002), 597-640
• R. Bhattacharya, Studies on the Carvaka/Lokayata (Anthem Press, 2011; first publ. Florence 2009)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.