Ten commentaries went into the blender

Claim (verbatim)

In 659 the ten Sanskrit commentaries then current on Vasubandhu's Triṃśikā — by Dharmapāla, Sthiramati, Nanda, Citrabhānu, Guṇamati, Jinamitra, Jñānacandra, Bandhuśrī, Śuddhacandra, and Jinaputra, as Xuanzang's pupil Kuiji lists them — crossed the imperial translation bureau's desk, and a purée came out the other side: the Cheng weishi lun, a single digest with Dharmapāla's positions as arbiter. Kuiji's own account (in his Cheng weishi lun shuji) records that ten separate translations were planned and that he persuaded the master to blend them instead. For East Asia the digest abolished the need for its sources; no independent translation of any of the ten ever entered the Chinese canon, and for nine of the ten the digest is now the only evidence that the work existed — a whole synchronic debate compressed into one voice's verdict. The exception proves the channel: Sthiramati's commentary survives, in a Sanskrit manuscript recovered in Nepal and edited by Sylvain Lévi (Paris, 1925) and in Tibetan translation, because Sthiramati's lineage had carriers outside the digest's world. Survival tracks the existence of a non-digest channel and nothing else. Prediction: a census of the ten commentators across the surviving canons will find zero independent translations of any of the ten Triṃśikā commentaries in the Chinese canon and exactly one of the ten surviving as an independent text anywhere — Sthiramati's, through the Nepalese Sanskrit and Tibetan channels (primary clause: the zero-and-exactly-one census; an independent Chinese translation, or a second independently surviving commentary of the ten, kills it). Exact computation: check the Taishō catalogue via CBETA for Triṃśikā commentaries and the Tōhoku catalogue for the Tibetan side. Kill: the CBETA XML-P5 open corpus and Taishō catalogue (T. 1585, T. 1586, T. 1830), Sylvain Lévi's Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi: deux traités de Vasubandhu (Paris, 1925), and the Tōhoku catalogue entries for Sthiramati's Triṃśikābhāṣya.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a census of the ten commentators across the surviving canons will find zero independent translations of any of the ten Triṃśikā commentaries in the Chinese canon and exactly one of the ten surviving as an independent text anywhere — Sthiramati's, through the Nepalese Sanskrit and Tibetan channels (primary clause: the zero-and-exactly-one census; an independent Chinese translation, or a second independently surviving commentary of the ten, kills it). Exact computation: check the Taishō catalogue via CBETA for Triṃśikā commentaries and the Tōhoku catalogue for the Tibetan side.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the CBETA XML-P5 open corpus and Taishō catalogue (T. 1585, T. 1586, T. 1830), Sylvain Lévi's Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi: deux traités de Vasubandhu (Paris, 1925), and the Tōhoku catalogue entries for Sthiramati's Triṃśikābhāṣya.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The zero-and-exactly-one census is a textbook fact of Yogacara studies: Kuiji's list of the ten, the decision to blend rather than translate them, the absence of any independent Chinese translation of the ten, and Sthiramati's bhasya as the sole independent survivor (Nepalese Sanskrit via Levi 1925, plus the Tibetan translation) are all stated in the standard editions and studies of the Cheng weishi lun and the Trimsika.

• S. Levi, Vijnaptimatratasiddhi: Deux traites de Vasubandhu (Paris, 1925)
• H. Buescher (ed.), Sthiramati's Trimsikavijnaptibhasya (Vienna, 2007), introduction
• D. Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology (London, 2002), on the Cheng weishi lun's composite genesis

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.