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When the monastery stops, the age pyramid freezes
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)
Manuscript populations have age pyramids, like human populations, and the pyramid's shape records the demography of the institution that did the copying. Hindu texts in Nepal were reproduced continuously by household paṇḍits and temple scribes into the nineteenth century, which should give their extant copies the normal treadmill signature: a young, steeply recent-skewed age distribution. Buddhist Sanskrit texts, by contrast, depended on monastic and Vajrācārya institutions whose copying output contracted, so their surviving population should be older and flatter — a frozen pyramid, preserved by veneration rather than replaced by production. The comparison isolates institutional continuity as a survival variable while holding climate, region, and storage constant, which no cross-regional comparison can do. If it holds, distribution shape alone can diagnose, for any corpus anywhere, whether its copying institution died before the collecting era.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue, dated Buddhist manuscripts will show a median colophon age at least 150 years older than dated Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava manuscripts, and a two-sample distribution test will reject identical shapes, with the Buddhist curve flatter (lower share in the most recent two centuries). Primary clause: the 150-year median difference; the shape test is secondary.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Colophon-date distributions by religious affiliation computed from the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue, with affiliations of works cross-checked in the Pandit database.
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.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- South Asia; Medieval Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 800 CE – 1850 CE South Asian/Nepalese Sanskrit manuscript record (NGMPP/NGMCP colophon corpus), earliest securely dated exemplars c.9th c. CE, through the corpus's 1850 bound. Claim's own anchor: continuous Hindu copying 'into the nineteenth century'. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Not yet reviewed
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Manuscript and scribal production Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Method — Assigned
- Survival analysis: hazard rates and half-lives Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Union catalogues Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
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
Continuous Newar/Vajrācārya copying vs. contracted monastic production is well described, but the demographic prediction — Buddhist copies median >=150 yrs older and flatter than Śaiva/Vaiṣṇava, isolating institutional continuity — is un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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