Four hundred years without a witness

Claim (verbatim)

Burma's dhammasattha literature — the Buddhist legal treatises that governed everyday life — is attested from the thirteenth century: Pagan-period inscriptions already cite dhammasat texts, and tradition ascribes a founding code to King Wareru of Martaban around the 1290s, long taken as the flagship of a Mon legal inheritance behind Burmese law. Yet as Lammerts' census of the manuscript tradition shows, the extant witnesses begin only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the genre's entire first four hundred years survive as citations, attributions and retrospective legend, not as text. The conjecture explains the gap by the genre's own working life: law books were use-texts on the recopying treadmill, continuously reworked, glossed into nissaya, versified and re-prosed with each juristic generation, so transmission was always of the current state, and earlier states were not preserved but overwritten — a mechanism that also manufactures antiquity, since each reworking kept the ancient ascription while replacing the substance. On this model the 'Mon origin' of Burmese law is an artifact of late attribution: the ascription stratum should be systematically older than every physical stratum, and the celebrated Wareru code should possess no Mon-language witness that predates its Burmese ones. Prediction: in the manuscript census underlying Lammerts' history, zero dhammasattha manuscripts will predate 1650; the earliest dated epigraphic citation of dhammasat will precede the earliest extant manuscript witness by more than 350 years; and the Wareru dhammasat will have no Mon-language witness older than its oldest Burmese-language witness (primary clause: the zero-before-1650 census; the verdict follows it). Kill: the manuscript inventory and epigraphic dossier in D. Christian Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the manuscript census underlying Lammerts' history, zero dhammasattha manuscripts will predate 1650; the earliest dated epigraphic citation of dhammasat will precede the earliest extant manuscript witness by more than 350 years; and the Wareru dhammasat will have no Mon-language witness older than its oldest Burmese-language witness (primary clause: the zero-before-1650 census; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the manuscript inventory and epigraphic dossier in D. Christian Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

This is Lammerts' book. Buddhist Law in Burma (2018) is built on exactly the manuscript census and epigraphic dossier the primary clause invokes, and it establishes the results directly: the extant dhammasattha witnesses begin only in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries (none before circa 1650), the genre's first four centuries survive as citation and attribution against a Pagan-period epigraphic floor, and the 'Mon origin' is an artifact of late ascription with no early Mon-language witness advantage for the Wareru code. A competent reader of Lammerts already holds the zero-before-1650 census and the citation-to-manuscript gap. Leaked.

• D. Christian Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018)

Predictions

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