The sutra remembers its road

Claim (verbatim)

Old Uyghur Buddhism was fed by two conversion channels in sequence: first the Tocharian-Sogdian cloisters of the Tarim — whence the Maitrisimit, translated by Prajnarakshita from the Toxri language (Tocharian A, whose Maitreyasamiti-Nataka it tracks) according to its own colophon — and later the Chinese church, whence Shingqo Shali Tutung of Beshbalik translated the Altun Yaruk from Yijing's Chinese Golden Light. Languages archive their teachers: each translation's loan stratum should betray its Vorlage not merely in isolated terms but in rate, because a translator's working lexicon is soaked in his source church's idiom. Prediction: normalizing by text length in the standard editions, the density of Chinese loanwords and Chinese-mediated Buddhist terms per thousand words will be at least three times higher in the Altun Yaruk than in the Maitrisimit, while Tocharian-mediated Indic forms show the reverse gradient by at least a factor of two (primary clause: the threefold Chinese-loan differential; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: classify loan etymologies with Rohrborn's Uigurisches Worterbuch over the editions' full glossaries and indices. Kill: Kaya's Uygurca Altun Yaruk (1994, with complete index), Tekin's Maitrisimit nom bitig (Berliner Turfantexte IX, 1980) and Geng Shimin and Klimkeit's edition of the Hami Maitrisimit (1988), with the VATEC corpus (Vorislamische Alttuerkische Texte: Elektronisches Corpus) for machine-readable text.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: normalizing by text length in the standard editions, the density of Chinese loanwords and Chinese-mediated Buddhist terms per thousand words will be at least three times higher in the Altun Yaruk than in the Maitrisimit, while Tocharian-mediated Indic forms show the reverse gradient by at least a factor of two (primary clause: the threefold Chinese-loan differential; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: classify loan etymologies with Rohrborn's Uigurisches Worterbuch over the editions' full glossaries and indices.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Kaya's Uygurca Altun Yaruk (1994, with complete index), Tekin's Maitrisimit nom bitig (Berliner Turfantexte IX, 1980) and Geng Shimin and Klimkeit's edition of the Hami Maitrisimit (1988), with the VATEC corpus (Vorislamische Alttuerkische Texte: Elektronisches Corpus) for machine-readable text.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The two Vorlagen are established — the Maitrisimit's colophon names the Toxri (Tocharian A) source and Singqo Sali Tutung translated the Altun Yaruk from Yijing's Chinese — and loan strata in Old Uyghur Buddhist vocabulary are much discussed lexeme by lexeme; but a normalized loan-density comparison between the two texts (loans per thousand words by mediating language) has not been published.

• S. Tekin, Maitrisimit nom bitig (Berliner Turfantexte IX, Akademie-Verlag, 1980)
• C. Kaya, Uygurca Altun Yaruk: Giris, metin ve dizin (Turk Dil Kurumu, 1994)
• K. Rohrborn, Uigurisches Worterbuch (Steiner, 1977-)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.