AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The kernel survives inside the shell
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)
For heavily taught śāstra texts the commentary was the working format: students met the sūtras already wrapped in explanation, and the bare root text became a specialist's object. Copying demand should therefore invert the intuitive hierarchy — the derivative outnumbers the original in the manuscript record, and the mūla increasingly survives as lemmata embedded inside commentaries rather than as an independent book. This is a structural necessity of a demand-driven copying economy, not an accident of taste, so it should hold across disciplines and sharpen over time as commentaries accumulate. If it holds, the editorial preference for independent root-text manuscripts is backwards for late periods: the commentarial transmission is the mainstream, and bare-mūla copies are the eccentric side channel.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue, for root texts possessing at least one major commentary, commentary-bearing manuscripts will outnumber bare-mūla manuscripts overall, with the ratio increasing by period band of copy date; secondarily, in the SARIT corpus the lemmata of a major bhāṣya will cover more than 80% of its mūla's wording. Primary clause: commentary-bearing copies outnumber bare-mūla copies for commented works.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue records distinguishing mūla-only from commentary manuscripts, with lemma-coverage computed on the SARIT e-text corpus.
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
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The commentary-as-working-format and mūla-surviving-as-embedded-lemmata phenomenon is recognized, but the specific catalogue test (commentary-bearing copies outnumber bare-mūla, ratio rising by period; >80% lemma coverage) is un-run.
- 'Mūlamadhyamakakārikā' — root text survives inside commentaries
- 'Strategies of Effective Digitization of Commentaries and Sub-commentaries', arXiv:2201.01693
Predictions
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