AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Apocrypha are priced in single scrolls
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)
Apocrypha are priced in single scrolls. The Kaiyuan shijiao lu's judgments of spuriousness and the economics of the lay merit market are the same fact seen twice: a genuine translation inherits its length from an Indic original, but an indigenously composed scripture is written INTO the merit economy, where the natural unit of commissioning, pricing, and dedication is the single juan — one scroll, one copying fee, one colophon. Chinese-composed scriptures should therefore be built to the one-scroll module: catalogue-flagged apocrypha measurably shorter than accepted translations of the same period, not because forgers were lazy but because their genre was a product format.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Take all texts classed as spurious or doubtful in the Kaiyuan shijiao lu (T 2154) with recorded juan counts, and all accepted translations catalogued in the same fascicles. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the share of one-juan texts among the spurious/doubtful class exceeds the share among accepted translations by at least 25 percentage points. Secondary: the median juan count of the spurious class is 1; and among Dunhuang copies of catalogue-flagged apocrypha, at least 70 percent are complete single-scroll units rather than stray fascicles of multi-juan works.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CBETA — the Kaiyuan shijiao lu (T 2154) with its per-title juan counts and spuriousness classes, plus the Taisho vol. 85 apocrypha section; IDP catalogued Dunhuang copies for the secondary clause. Resolvable against CBETA without new ingestion.
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); 248-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_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Scholarship on Chinese Buddhist apocrypha and the Kaiyuan lu's spurious/doubtful classes is rich, and individual apocrypha are routinely noted as one-juan works (e.g. Vajrasamadhi, Zhancha jing), but no located study runs the length-distribution comparison against accepted translations or ties it to the merit-economy pricing mechanism.
Predictions
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