The spade's Laozi disagrees with the shelf's

Claim (verbatim)

The received Laozi (老子 / Daodejing, in the Wang Bi 王弼 recension) presents itself as a fixed 81-chapter text in the order Dao jing then De jing, but the excavated witnesses show that this stability is a late achievement of transmission, not an original fact. The Mawangdui (馬王堆) silk manuscripts (c. 200 BCE) run the De jing (德經) before the Dao jing (道經) and diverge from the received text at the graph level on a scale unknown within the transmitted tradition; the Guodian (郭店) bamboo slips (c. 300 BCE) contain only a partial selection, in bundles whose sequence matches neither Mawangdui nor the received order. The mechanism is that a text copied for three centuries before the transmitted line even begins accumulates exactly the structural and lexical variance that later recopying then freezes out; the received uniformity is survivorship, not fidelity. Prediction restated: the character-level variant rate between Mawangdui and the received text runs at least five times the variance among the received witnesses, and the top-level bipartite order is inverted. What the shelf transmits as a single stable book, the spade reveals as the tail end of a much noisier tradition whose earlier variance was edited into silence by the very act of successful copying.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: aligning the Mawangdui and received Laozi passage by passage from published transcriptions, the character-level variant rate between Mawangdui and received will exceed the variant rate among the major received witnesses by at least a factor of five, and the top-level bipartite order will be inverted (De 德 before Dao 道 at Mawangdui) - a difference of macro-structure, not merely orthography (primary clause: the >=5x excavated-versus-received variant rate together with the order inversion; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (partly not yet built): the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org) received Laozi (老子) against the Mawangdui and Guodian transcriptions in the CHANT database (漢達文庫, CUHK) or the published Qiu Xigui (裘錫圭) et al. critical transcriptions, aligned passage by passage for a character-level variant count.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

One conjunct of the primary clause is flatly in print: the De-before-Dao top-level inversion at Mawangdui is textbook, published to the point of titling Henricks' Te-Tao Ching. The other conjunct — a character-level variant rate >=5x the variance among received witnesses — is the load-bearing new arithmetic, and it is not computed as posed: the Mawangdui–received divergence is exhaustively catalogued (Henricks) but not expressed as a ratio against received-internal variance. Because the verdict follows the conjunction and the >=5x half is un-run, the primary clause is not guaranteed in print. Adjacent, with the order-inversion conjunct noted as already leaked-textbook.

• R.G. Henricks, Lao-tzu Te-Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine, 1989)
• R.G. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)
• W.G. Boltz, 'Lao tzu Tao te ching', in M. Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley, 1993)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.