← All conjectures · South Asian text cultures
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
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.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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.
Sources cited by the triage
- 'Mūlamadhyamakakārikā' — root text survives inside commentaries
- 'Strategies of Effective Digitization of Commentaries and Sub-commentaries', arXiv:2201.01693
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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