AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Even the summit is half drowned
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Claim (verbatim)
Survival bias is best measured where preservation was strongest, so take the summit: Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025), the most institutionally successful intellectual of medieval Kashmir, shielded by a living exegetical lineage (Jayaratha's thirteenth-century Tantrāloka commentary) and by pan-Indian scholastic prestige (the Abhinavabhāratī on the Nāṭyaśāstra, the Locana on the Dhvanyāloka). His oeuvre is self-indexed: he cross-references his own works, and Jayaratha quotes more — the Kramakeli, the commentary on his teacher Bhaṭṭa Tauta's Kāvyakautuka (teacher's work and pupil's commentary both lost), among others; even the surviving Abhinavabhāratī is lacunose. If the best-protected oeuvre in Kashmir shed a third of itself, then oeuvre-level completeness anywhere in the manuscript tradition is an illusion, and the size of premodern Sanskrit production should be revised upward accordingly. Prediction: compiling the register of works attributed to Abhinavagupta by self-citation or by Jayaratha's quotations (the lists in K. C. Pandey's monograph) and resolving each against the NCC and the NGMCP catalogue, at least one-third will have no extant manuscript witness, and the lost share among his esoteric Krama-related titles will exceed the lost share among his poetics titles (primary clause: the one-third lost share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the work-register in K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta: An Historical and Philosophical Study (2nd ed., Chowkhamba, 1963), resolved against the New Catalogus Catalogorum (s.v. Abhinavagupta) and the NGMCP online catalogue.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: compiling the register of works attributed to Abhinavagupta by self-citation or by Jayaratha's quotations (the lists in K. C. Pandey's monograph) and resolving each against the NCC and the NGMCP catalogue, at least one-third will have no extant manuscript witness, and the lost share among his esoteric Krama-related titles will exceed the lost share among his poetics titles (primary clause: the one-third lost share; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the work-register in K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta: An Historical and Philosophical Study (2nd ed., Chowkhamba, 1963), resolved against the New Catalogus Catalogorum (s.v. Abhinavagupta) and the NGMCP online catalogue.
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.
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
Abhinavagupta's lost works — the Kramakeli, the Kavyakautuka commentary, the Sivadrstyalocana and others known from self-citation and Jayaratha — are enumerated in the standard registers (Pandey; Rastogi), so the phenomenon of a lacunose summit oeuvre is fully documented. The oeuvre-level lost-share computation (the one-third threshold and the Krama-versus-poetics differential) has not been located.
- K.C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta: An Historical and Philosophical Study (2nd ed., Chowkhamba, 1963)
- N. Rastogi, Introduction to the Tantraloka: A Study in Structure (Motilal Banarsidass, 1987)
Predictions
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