AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Refuting the neighbor, not the canon
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)
Refuting the neighbor, not the canon: Neo-Confucian anti-Buddhist polemic drew its knowledge of Buddhism almost entirely from Chan sayings literature rather than from sutras or scholastic treatises, because the literati met Buddhism socially — in conversation with Chan monks and through yulu circulating in elite networks — not through canon-reading. Polemic mirrors the sociology of contact, not the architecture of the rival's authority: the Buddhism the Confucians refuted was its most oral, least scriptural genre, and their picture of the entire tradition was set by it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Catalogue identifiable Buddhist quotations and named textual references in the Zhuzi yulei and Zhu Xi's collected prose. Primary clause: at least 70 percent of identifiable Buddhist textual material derives from Chan yulu and lamp-record literature (Linji lu, Jingde chuandeng lu, and kin) versus under 10 percent from translated Indian sutras and sastras; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the same distribution holds in the recorded sayings of the Cheng brothers a century earlier.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Kanripo and ctext.org machine-readable texts of the Zhuzi yulei, crossed against the CBETA canon for source identification of the quoted material.
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
That Zhu Xi's knowledge of Buddhism was essentially confined to Chan — met socially through monks and yulu, with Dahui Zonggao as his imagined opponent — is established in the scholarship, anticipating the claim's substance. The quantitative catalogue of identifiable Buddhist quotations in the Zhuzi yulei with the 70/10 split is un-run.
Predictions
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