The librarian's list outlived the library

Claim (verbatim)

In 1888, three years after the last Burmese king was shipped into exile and the palace collection at Mandalay began its dispersal, the royal librarian U Yan (Mahāsīrijeyasū) compiled the Piṭakat samuiṅʺ — a bibliography of 2,047 works, the whole of Burmese and Burmese-Pali literature as the tradition itself catalogued it at the moment of its decapitation. Mabel Bode built The Pali Literature of Burma (1909) on it, and Peter Nyunt's translation (2012) has made it checkable line by line. The conjecture treats the list as a fixed attestation baseline for measuring loss in a manuscript culture that lost its royal engine: with the court's copying economy gone, the treadmill stopped, and titles that existed in 1888 in a handful of monastic copies should have been quietly dying ever since — with mortality concentrated where recopying incentives died first, in the secular and technical genres (law, medicine, poetics, vernacular verse) rather than in the tipitaka core that ordination economies kept alive. The great surviving collections — the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation's tens of thousands of bundles, the British Library's Burmese holdings, the Universities' Central Library in Yangon — are exactly the net against which the 1888 baseline can be trawled. Prediction: matching the 2,047 titles of the Piṭakat samuiṅʺ against the catalogued holdings of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, the British Library and the Universities' Central Library, at least one title in seven — over 290 works attested as extant in 1888 — will prove to have no locatable manuscript witness today, and the unlocated share in secular-technical genres will run at least double the share in canonical-commentarial literature (primary clause: the one-in-seven unlocated floor; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built): a title-match table assembled from Peter Nyunt's Catalogue of the Piṭakat-samuiṅʺ (Fragile Palm Leaves / Lumbini International Research Institute, 2012) against the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation inventories, the British Library Burmese manuscript catalogues, and the Universities' Central Library catalogues, with Bode's Pali Literature of Burma (1909) as control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching the 2,047 titles of the Piṭakat samuiṅʺ against the catalogued holdings of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, the British Library and the Universities' Central Library, at least one title in seven — over 290 works attested as extant in 1888 — will prove to have no locatable manuscript witness today, and the unlocated share in secular-technical genres will run at least double the share in canonical-commentarial literature (primary clause: the one-in-seven unlocated floor; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built): a title-match table assembled from Peter Nyunt's Catalogue of the Piṭakat-samuiṅʺ (Fragile Palm Leaves / Lumbini International Research Institute, 2012) against the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation inventories, the British Library Burmese manuscript catalogues, and the Universities' Central Library catalogues, with Bode's Pali Literature of Burma (1909) as control.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The 1888 Pitakat samuin (2,047 titles) is a fixed attestation baseline, translated and made checkable by Nyunt (2012) and long used since Bode's Pali Literature of Burma (1909). But the primary clause is a loss-match - at least one title in seven with no locatable manuscript witness across the Fragile Palm Leaves, British Library and Universities' Central Library holdings, with secular-technical mortality double the canonical - and that title-by-title trawl is explicitly 'not yet built.' The baseline and the modern collections both exist; the match that would yield the one-in-seven floor is un-run. Adjacent.

• Peter Nyunt, Catalogue of the Pitakat-samuin (U Yan's 1888 bibliography) (Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation / Lumbini International Research Institute, 2012)
• Mabel Haynes Bode, The Pali Literature of Burma (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909)

Predictions

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