The translation buried its sources

Claim (verbatim)

The Pali commentaries that anchor Theravāda orthodoxy are the tombstone of a whole Sinhala literature. When Buddhaghosa worked at the Mahāvihāra of Anurādhapura in the early fifth century, he did not compose commentaries so much as translate and condense ones that already existed — the old Sinhala aṭṭhakathā, which he names as his sources: the Mahā-aṭṭhakathā, the Mahāpaccarī ("Great Raft"), the Kurundī, with the mainland Andhaka-aṭṭhakathā consulted for dissenting rulings. His Pali versions were so successful that the Sinhala originals stopped being copied and vanished entirely — not one survives — so the founding commentarial literature of Sri Lanka, by then perhaps centuries deep, is known only through the work that replaced it. And the ghost-titles are not evenly buried. Monastic law must record dissent, because a vinaya judge needs the variant rulings on the table; doctrinal exegesis can harmonize its sources silently. The named dead should therefore cluster in the Vinaya commentary, the Samantapāsādikā, while the sutta commentaries digest the same sources namelessly. Prediction: counting every citation of the named lost Sinhala commentaries (Mahā-aṭṭhakathā, Mahāpaccarī, Kurundī, Andhaka-aṭṭhakathā, in their citation forms and inflections) across the complete aṭṭhakathā corpus, at least three of the named sources will each be cited over twenty-five times in the Samantapāsādikā, and the Samantapāsādikā will carry over three-quarters of all such named citations in the corpus, out of proportion to its share of the corpus's bulk (primary clause: the three-quarters concentration in the Vinaya commentary; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: search the open Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana corpus for the citation forms (mahāaṭṭhakathāyaṃ, mahāpaccariyaṃ, kurundiyaṃ, andhakaṭṭhakathāyaṃ, and their variants) and tabulate hits by commentary. Kill: the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka digital corpus of the Vipassana Research Institute (tipitaka.org), with the source-citation analysis in E. W. Adikaram, Early History of Buddhism in Ceylon (1946) as the control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: counting every citation of the named lost Sinhala commentaries (Mahā-aṭṭhakathā, Mahāpaccarī, Kurundī, Andhaka-aṭṭhakathā, in their citation forms and inflections) across the complete aṭṭhakathā corpus, at least three of the named sources will each be cited over twenty-five times in the Samantapāsādikā, and the Samantapāsādikā will carry over three-quarters of all such named citations in the corpus, out of proportion to its share of the corpus's bulk (primary clause: the three-quarters concentration in the Vinaya commentary; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: search the open Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana corpus for the citation forms (mahāaṭṭhakathāyaṃ, mahāpaccariyaṃ, kurundiyaṃ, andhakaṭṭhakathāyaṃ, and their variants) and tabulate hits by commentary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka digital corpus of the Vipassana Research Institute (tipitaka.org), with the source-citation analysis in E. W. Adikaram, Early History of Buddhism in Ceylon (1946) as the control.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The sources-of-the-atthakatha literature has already tabulated these citations: Adikaram's registers and the reference literature give per-source counts for the Samantapasadika (Mahapaccari ~94 references, Kurundi ~67, Maha-atthakatha ~39, Andhaka ~13 - three named sources already over 25), and the Mahapaccari and Kurundi are known precisely as Vinaya commentaries transmitted through the Samantapasadika's quotations, with a dedicated study of the Andhaka quotations in the Samantapasadika. The Vinaya-concentration the primary clause predicts is the published core of the field; only the corpus-share arithmetic is left.

• E.W. Adikaram, Early History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Migoda, 1946), registers of the Sihala atthakatha citations
• O. von Hinuber, A Handbook of Pali Literature (Berlin, 1996), sections on the Samantapasadika and its sources
• P. Kieffer-Pulz's study of the Andhakatthakatha quotations in the Samantapasadika (1993), and her Verlorene Ganthipadas zum buddhistischen Ordensrecht (Wiesbaden, 2013)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.