AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The extracted chapter drifts
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)
The extracted chapter drifts. The Guanshiyin pumen pin circulated both inside full Lotus Sutra copies and as a standalone apotropaic booklet. Inside the Lotus, a copyist works from full-canon exemplars under sutra-copying discipline and proofreading chains; the standalone charm-text is copied from whatever single sheet came to hand, for immediate protective use, outside any audit. Extraction removes the canonical anchor, so the same words should measurably drift faster once they travel alone — textual stability as a property of codicological company, not of the words themselves.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Collate Dunhuang witnesses of the Pumen chapter in two classes — embedded in multi-chapter Lotus copies versus codicologically standalone — against T 262 chapter 25. Primary clause (verdict follows it): variant density (substitutions plus omissions per 1,000 graphs) in standalone copies exceeds embedded copies by at least 50 percent. Secondary: the standalone class has the heavier tail — its 90th-percentile copy diverges at three times the embedded 90th percentile.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: IDP-catalogued Lotus Sutra and standalone Guanyin-chapter manuscripts from Dunhuang (the most numerous text group in Cave 17), collated against CBETA T 262. Resolvable against IDP plus CBETA.
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
The Pumen chapter's dual circulation is thoroughly documented (~128 standalone Guanyin-jing copies at Dunhuang beside 860 Lotus copies) and the British Library's Lotus Sutra project has collated hundreds of witnesses, but the embedded-versus-standalone variant-density comparison is un-run.
Predictions
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