Seven hundred skimmed from ten million

Claim (verbatim)

The Sattasaī ascribed to King Hāla — the foundational anthology of Prakrit lyric — carries its own production statistic: an opening gāthā says the seven hundred were selected from a crore, ten million, of ornate verses. Discount the hyperbole and the claim remains that the anthology was a raft on an ocean of Prakrit stanzas now otherwise gone. The raft itself never froze. An anthology with no armature — no narrative, no chronology, no doctrinal order, only detachable two-line poems — cannot defend its own boundaries, and every copying region re-anthologized it: Weber's collation of 1881, still the fullest, found the recensions (the vulgate with Gaṅgādhara's commentary, the two "Telinga" recensions, Sādhāraṇadeva's, the Jain recension) agreeing on only about 430 gāthās out of the nearly one thousand distinct gāthās his witnesses jointly transmit. The shape is the finding: for armature-less anthologies the "work" is a brand and a charter, the body is a rolling sample of the drowned corpus — so the charter verse should be universal while the body churns. Prediction: recomputing the collation from Weber's apparatus, the gāthās common to all major recensions will number under half of the union of all recensions' contents, while the charter gāthā — the verse counting seven hundred selected from a crore — will stand in every recension collated (primary clause: the common core under half the union; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: rebuild the per-recension contents table from Weber's edition and count core, union, and the charter verse's attestation. Kill: Albrecht Weber, Das Saptaçatakam des Hâla (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes VII.4, Leipzig, 1881; public domain on archive.org), whose apparatus registers each recension's contents gāthā by gāthā.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: recomputing the collation from Weber's apparatus, the gāthās common to all major recensions will number under half of the union of all recensions' contents, while the charter gāthā — the verse counting seven hundred selected from a crore — will stand in every recension collated (primary clause: the common core under half the union; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: rebuild the per-recension contents table from Weber's edition and count core, union, and the charter verse's attestation.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Albrecht Weber, Das Saptaçatakam des Hâla (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes VII.4, Leipzig, 1881; public domain on archive.org), whose apparatus registers each recension's contents gāthā by gāthā.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause restates Weber's own published result: his 1881 collation registers roughly 430-450 gathas common to all witnesses out of nearly a thousand distinct gathas jointly transmitted by the recensions - the common core under half the union is the edition's headline finding, repeated in the standard modern accounts of the Sattasai's recensions.

• A. Weber, Das Saptacatakam des Hala (Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes VII.4, Leipzig, 1881)
• P. Khoroche & H. Tieken, Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai (Albany, 2009), introduction

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.