AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Recitation beats revision
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Recitation beats revision: in Chinese Buddhism, translation quality lost to liturgical installation. Once a version of a scripture was embedded in recitation practice, philologically superior retranslations — including the state-sponsored Xuanzang corpus — could not displace it in quotation; new versions won uptake only inside the doctrinal lineage that produced them. The effective canon was fixed at the level of memorized sound, so version choice in citation should be predicted by the citing author's school lineage, not by the availability or age of better translations — a topological claim about uptake, not the familiar observation that Kumarajiva stayed popular.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In CBETA, collect identifiable quotations of the Diamond Sutra in Chinese works composed after 800, when six competing translations existed. Primary clause: outside Faxiang/Yogacara-lineage works, at least 90 percent of quotations follow Kumarajiva's version rather than any later translation; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: within Faxiang-lineage commentaries the Xuanzang-corpus versions reach at least parity with Kumarajiva, isolating the mechanism as school-liturgical rather than chronological.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the CBETA machine-readable Chinese Buddhist canon (full Taisho text, all competing Diamond Sutra translations included), searchable for quotation wording.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); 188-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w02_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W02 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. DEVIATION DISCLOSURE: after an output-limit resume, one accidental no-op placeholder Write to the session scratchpad preceded this packet Write; nothing was read and no information entered the generation; blindness intact, but the run used two Writes, not one.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Kumarajiva's Diamond Sutra remaining the liturgically dominant and most-quoted version despite Xuanzang's philologically superior retranslation is well documented. The operationalization — CBETA quotation censuses with lineage-predicted version choice (Faxiang works reaching parity with Xuanzang's version) — is un-run.
Predictions
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