Eighteen books announced, one delivered

Claim (verbatim)

Rājaśekhara's Kāvyamīmāṃsā (c. 900), the poeticians' treatise on the whole institution of literature, opens by announcing its own architecture: eighteen adhikaraṇas, named one by one, covering the entire science. What survives is the first — the Kavirahasya, the "poet's secret," on the working life of the poet — and nothing of the other seventeen. The loss is usually taken at face value: a mutilated masterpiece. But an announced architecture is a promise, not a receipt, and śāstra has a habit of tables of contents grander than their books. The two hypotheses — written-and-lost versus announced-and-never-finished — separate cleanly in the reception record, because the Kāvyamīmāṃsā was strip-mined by later writers: Bhoja worked from it, and Hemacandra's Kāvyānuśāsana lifts it wholesale. If seventeen further books ever circulated, the miners' tunnels would reach them. Prediction: mapping every identified borrowing from or citation of the Kāvyamīmāṃsā in later poetics — the source-parallels registered in the Parikh-Kulkarni edition of Hemacandra's Kāvyānuśāsana and the borrowings documented in V. Raghavan's study of Bhoja — all will fall within the extant Kavirahasya, with no later author quoting Kāvyamīmāṃsā material from any of the seventeen other announced divisions (primary clause: zero beyond-the-torso borrowings; one secure counter-quotation kills it, and would itself be a sighting of the lost body). Kill: the Kāvyamīmāṃsā (Gaekwad's Oriental Series 1, ed. Dalal and Sastry, third revised edition 1934; GRETIL e-text), Hemacandra's Kāvyānuśāsana with its source apparatus (ed. Parikh and Kulkarni, Bombay, second edition 1964), and the parallels register in V. Raghavan's Bhoja's Śṛṅgāra Prakāśa (Madras, 1963).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: mapping every identified borrowing from or citation of the Kāvyamīmāṃsā in later poetics — the source-parallels registered in the Parikh-Kulkarni edition of Hemacandra's Kāvyānuśāsana and the borrowings documented in V. Raghavan's study of Bhoja — all will fall within the extant Kavirahasya, with no later author quoting Kāvyamīmāṃsā material from any of the seventeen other announced divisions (primary clause: zero beyond-the-torso borrowings; one secure counter-quotation kills it, and would itself be a sighting of the lost body).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Kāvyamīmāṃsā (Gaekwad's Oriental Series 1, ed. Dalal and Sastry, third revised edition 1934; GRETIL e-text), Hemacandra's Kāvyānuśāsana with its source apparatus (ed. Parikh and Kulkarni, Bombay, second edition 1964), and the parallels register in V. Raghavan's Bhoja's Śṛṅgāra Prakāśa (Madras, 1963).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That only the Kavirahasya of the eighteen announced adhikaranas survives is textbook, and Hemacandra's wholesale borrowing (about a quarter of the extant text) is documented in the editions with source apparatus; but the discriminating audit - mapping every registered borrowing in Hemacandra and Bhoja against the torso to separate written-and-lost from announced-and-never-finished - was not located as ever having been run.

• Kavyamimamsa of Rajasekhara, ed. C.D. Dalal & R.A. Sastry, 3rd rev. ed. (Gaekwad's Oriental Series 1, Baroda, 1934), introduction
• V. Raghavan, Bhoja's Srngara Prakasa (Madras, 1963)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.