The founder's book died of the school's success

Claim (verbatim)

Buddhist epistemology begins with Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya (c. 500 CE), the compendium that founded the discipline — and no Sanskrit manuscript of it is known to exist. The killer was not the fall of Indian Buddhism but the school's own success: within two centuries Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika, framed as a commentary on it, became the curriculum, and the commentarial industry — Devendrabuddhi, Śākyabuddhi, Prajñākaragupta, Dharmottara and the rest — attached itself to Dharmakīrti, leaving the founding text without a classroom to keep it copied. What remains of Dignāga's Sanskrit are quotation-fossils in friends and opponents, a mūla translated twice into Tibetan by teams that disagree, and a recovery channel of extraordinary indirectness: the Sanskrit codex of Jinendrabuddhi's ṭīkā — the one Indian commentary the Pramāṇasamuccaya ever received — surfaced in Tibet, and its lemmata let Ernst Steinkellner publish a hypothetical Sanskrit reconstruction of chapter 1 (2005), a lost book rebuilt from the packaging of its sole commentary. Supersession, unlike catastrophe, leaves a ledger: the commentarial fan-out around the two authors should be wildly asymmetric in the canon that imported the whole school. Prediction: counting Indian commentaries in the Tanjur's pramāṇa (tshad ma) division by root text, works commenting on Dharmakīrti's treatises will outnumber works commenting on the Pramāṇasamuccaya by at least eight to one, with Jinendrabuddhi's ṭīkā the only Indian Pramāṇasamuccaya commentary in the canon, and the Sanskrit manuscript record will show the same shape — codices of Dharmakīrti's works among the Tibetan monastic finds, none of the Pramāṇasamuccaya itself (primary clause: the eight-to-one commentary ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Tōhoku Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons (Sendai, 1934), tshad-ma section, counted against the Vienna rKTs Kanjur-Tanjur database (rkts.org); Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana's Tibet manuscript lists (Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 21-24, 1935-1938) for the Sanskrit side; and Steinkellner's reconstruction with the Jinendrabuddhi editions in the Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region series (Beijing-Vienna, 2005-).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: counting Indian commentaries in the Tanjur's pramāṇa (tshad ma) division by root text, works commenting on Dharmakīrti's treatises will outnumber works commenting on the Pramāṇasamuccaya by at least eight to one, with Jinendrabuddhi's ṭīkā the only Indian Pramāṇasamuccaya commentary in the canon, and the Sanskrit manuscript record will show the same shape — codices of Dharmakīrti's works among the Tibetan monastic finds, none of the Pramāṇasamuccaya itself (primary clause: the eight-to-one commentary ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Tōhoku Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons (Sendai, 1934), tshad-ma section, counted against the Vienna rKTs Kanjur-Tanjur database (rkts.org); Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana's Tibet manuscript lists (Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 21-24, 1935-1938) for the Sanskrit side; and Steinkellner's reconstruction with the Jinendrabuddhi editions in the Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region series (Beijing-Vienna, 2005-).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Steinkellner's edition states outright that Jinendrabuddhi's tika is the only commentary ever written on the Pramanasamuccaya, and the standard survey of the epistemological school's texts catalogues the many Indian commentaries on Dharmakirti's treatises in the Tanjur, so the eight-to-one ratio is guaranteed list-arithmetic on published catalogues; Sankrtyayana's manuscript lists (Dharmakirti codices found, no Pramanasamuccaya) are themselves the published record the conjecture cites.

• E. Steinkellner, H. Krasser, H. Lasic (eds.), Jinendrabuddhi's Visalamalavati Pramanasamuccayatika, Chapter 1 (Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region 1, Beijing-Vienna, 2005), introduction
• E. Steinkellner & M.T. Much, Texte der erkenntnistheoretischen Schule des Buddhismus (Gottingen, 1995)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.