AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Merit copies sutras, catalogues keep sastras
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)
Merit copies sutras, catalogues keep sastras: Chinese Buddhism ran two preservation channels with different physics. Scripture was reproduced by the lay merit economy — copying a sutra earned merit, copying a commentary did not — while scholastic literature survived through monastic cataloguing and canon compilation, which optimize completeness rather than copy count. A use-assemblage like the Dunhuang library cave should therefore be flooded with a few devotional scriptures and nearly empty of sastra, while the received canon's title-list is sastra-heavy: the two archives disagree because they sample different channels, and the disagreement measures the merit economy.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Compare genre shares between the received catalogue and the cave. Primary clause: treatise and commentary classes account for at least 25 percent of titles in the Kaiyuan-era canon catalogue but under 8 percent of manuscript copies among catalogued Chinese Buddhist manuscripts from Dunhuang; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the ten texts with the highest Dunhuang copy counts are all sutras or devotional/apocryphal scriptures, none scholastic treatises.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) database of catalogued Dunhuang manuscripts, with the Kaiyuan shijiao lu catalogue (Taisho 2154, machine-readable in CBETA) as the canon baseline.
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 Dunhuang copying was merit-driven and devotional-scripture-dominated is standard (mass copies of the Diamond and Lotus sutras; copying sutras earned merit that copying commentaries did not), anticipating the two-channel physics. The quantitative genre-share contrast between the Kaiyuan catalogue and the cave assemblage (25 percent vs 8 percent clause) has not been computed.
Predictions
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