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Four literatures hang from one wounded codex
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“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
The oldest stratum of the eastern Indo-Aryan vernaculars — the caryā songs of the tantric siddhas, claimed as the fountainhead by Bengali, Assamese, Odia, and Maithili literary history alike — survives in exactly one manuscript: the palm-leaf codex of the fifty-song collection with Munidatta's Sanskrit commentary that Haraprasād Śāstrī found in the Nepal Durbar Library in 1907. The codex is wounded — missing leaves have taken several songs outright — and its wounds are patched from abroad: the Tibetan Tanjur carries a translation of the collection with its commentary, from which the lost songs' content is read back, both sides printed together in Kvaerne's edition. One damaged export copy plus a foreign shadow: that is the entire home survival of four literatures' first centuries. And the Tanjur measures how much more there was, for it preserves a whole shelf of caryā and dohā works under the siddhas' names, translated from Indic originals that no longer exist anywhere. Prediction: counting the caryā- and dohā-genre works attributed to the siddhas in the Tanjur, under 15% will have any surviving witness in an Indic language, and the survivors will be precisely the pieces with continuing Nepalese transmission — Saraha's and Kāṇha's dohākoṣas, the caryā collection itself — with none surviving through mainland Indian collections (primary clause: the under-15% Indic survival share; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: harvest the genre entries from the Tanjur catalogues and resolve each against the published Indic-side editions and the Nepalese microfilm record. Kill: the Tōhoku Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons (Sendai, 1934) with the Vienna rKTs Kanjur-Tanjur database (rkts.org) for the count, Per Kvaerne's An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (Oslo, 1977), M. Shahidullah's Les chants mystiques de Kāṇha et de Saraha (Paris, 1928), and the NGMCP online catalogue for the Nepal side.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: counting the caryā- and dohā-genre works attributed to the siddhas in the Tanjur, under 15% will have any surviving witness in an Indic language, and the survivors will be precisely the pieces with continuing Nepalese transmission — Saraha's and Kāṇha's dohākoṣas, the caryā collection itself — with none surviving through mainland Indian collections (primary clause: the under-15% Indic survival share; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: harvest the genre entries from the Tanjur catalogues and resolve each against the published Indic-side editions and the Nepalese microfilm record.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Tōhoku Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons (Sendai, 1934) with the Vienna rKTs Kanjur-Tanjur database (rkts.org) for the count, Per Kvaerne's An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (Oslo, 1977), M. Shahidullah's Les chants mystiques de Kāṇha et de Saraha (Paris, 1928), and the NGMCP online catalogue for the Nepal side.
Browse the registry: Published editions →
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How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- South Asia; Medieval Tagged by Claude (Opus 4.8)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 700 CE – 1200 CE Carya songs of the tantric siddhas (Saraha, Kanha et al., Buddhist tantric tradition c.8th-12th c. CE) surviving via a single Nepalese codex and Tibetan Tanjur translations; Kvaerne's 1977 edition/Tanjur catalogues are the instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Philology, editions & stemmatics damaged unique manuscript patched via a Tibetan translation witness Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Lost literary works the first centuries of four vernacular literatures survive in one codex and a foreign translation, with the rest lost Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim the prediction is the Indic-side survival share of works attested in a translated canon, a survival claim about a vernacular song corpus Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Reviewed — none applies
- a survival share resolved against catalogues; no apparatus Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Published editions; Union catalogues the Tohoku catalogue with the rKTs database supplies the genre counts and the NGMCP catalogue the Nepalese side, with Kvaerne's and Shahidullah's editions as the Indic witnesses Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, India/South Asia wave 2 weighted by inferred textual production rather than survival; every item grounded in real works, authors, catalogues, and testimonia, including the real evidence of loss (citing authors, sole codices, translation corpora, epigraphic attestation, editio-princeps histories); no fabricated citations; deliberately occupying ground disjoint from the 2026-07-16 India wave and the earlier w14 South Asia wave.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The sole-codex survival of the carya collection and the Tanjur's role in restoring its lost songs are textbook (Kvaerne prints both sides together), and it is a commonplace that most siddha doha and carya works survive only in Tibetan translation; but the genre-wide Tanjur census with an Indic-survival share and the Nepalese-channel-exclusivity clause was not located as ever having been computed.
Sources cited by the triage
- P. Kvaerne, An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (Oslo, 1977)
- K.R. Schaeffer, Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha (Oxford, 2005)
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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