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The Ark at Haeinsa
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“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)
The Taisho canon (1924-1934) prints the Second Tripitaka Koreana (carved 1236-1251) as its base text and collates the Song, Yuan, and Ming printed canons in its apparatus; the Koreana descends from the Northern Song Kaibao canon of 971-983, a state of the tradition China itself later pruned. If peripheral preservation is real, the earliest stratum of Chinese Buddhist translation - Eastern Han through Jin, c. 150-420 CE - should survive disproportionately on the Korean side: texts of that stratum will lack Song/Yuan/Ming witnesses in the apparatus (riding the Koreana alone) at a far higher rate than Tang-era translations of 618-907, because China's own printed lineages progressively dropped obsolete early versions that Korea, copying an older state of the canon at the frontier, kept. The periphery is a refrigerator: distance from the center of use is protection from the center's editing.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: among Taisho texts (vols. 1-55) with a translator attribution datable before 420 CE, the proportion whose apparatus records no Song, Yuan, or Ming witness anywhere in the text is at least 2x the corresponding proportion among texts translated 618-907; coverage guard: at least 150 texts in each date bin with machine-readable apparatus, else inconclusive.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CBETA (cross-checked against the SAT Daizokyo text database) - for every Taisho text with a dated translator attribution, tabulate translation-era bin against presence or absence of Song/Yuan/Ming witness sigla in the digitized apparatus, and compare the Korean-only proportions across bins.
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
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-20, for the connected-Old-World (movement-signatures) wave. The sixteen items lean on digit-string error phylogeny, first-translation-lag profiles (backlog cliffs and two-pulse corridors), bridge-language fingerprints (Sogdian, Aramaic-chancery, Judeo-Arabic), attribution drift, and pulse/directional asymmetries, with five anti-connection wagers (ordinals 2, 9, 13, 14, 15) where independence or non-transmission is the predicted outcome.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The factual scaffolding is standard canon scholarship: the Taisho's choice of the Second Koreana as base text, the Koreana's descent from the Kaibao canon of 971-983, and the progressive loss of archaic Eastern Han-through-Jin translations from the Song/Yuan/Ming printed lineages with survival riding the Korean line are all established, the last discussed qualitatively in the literature on the earliest Chinese translations. What the pin adds is the census itself: to my knowledge no one has tabulated Song/Yuan/Ming apparatus-sigla presence by translation-era bin across Taisho vols. 1-55 to quantify peripheral preservation as a proportion. One design caution the resolution must name: absence of the three sigla can reflect a text's simple non-inclusion in those canons for reasons of catalogue scope rather than editorial pruning of obsolete versions, and CBETA's apparatus digitization is uneven across volumes. Established mechanism, unrun census: adjacent.
Sources cited by the triage
- Lewis R. Lancaster with Sung-bae Park, The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, University of California Press, 1979.
- Jan Nattier, A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms Periods, IRIAB, Soka University, 2008. — Survival, loss, and misattribution in the archaic translation stratum.
- Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia (eds.), Spreading Buddha's Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, Columbia University Press, 2016. — The Kaibao lineage and the later printed canons.
Predictions
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