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Late Tantras Turn to Lhasa
Known defect — found by this project’s own review and published rather than repaired: Triage found the claim's description of the Song translation bureau ('largely retranslating') contradicted in print (Sen 2002); the ≤10% Chinese-coverage pin is at genuine risk. Read the full triage rationale ↓
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)
Translation corridors are valves with dates. China's appetite for Indic Buddhist texts ran hot from the 2nd through the 8th century and closed after the Song translation bureau's decline (bureau active 982-c. 1082, largely retranslating); Tibet's opened with the imperial commissions of the 8th-9th centuries and surged again in the second diffusion after 986. So composition date predicts destination: Sanskrit works composed before 500 CE live in the Chinese canon; works composed after 900 - the mature tantras, the Kalacakra literature of c. 1025 and its cousins - live in the Tibetan canon and almost never in the Chinese. The coverage differential by century of composition is the fossil of a switched valve, not of taste.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: among datable Sanskrit Buddhist works with surviving Sanskrit e-texts, those composed 950-1250 have a Tibetan canonical translation in at least 70% of cases and a Chinese canonical translation in at most 10%, while those composed 100-500 show a Chinese share of at least 60%; the Chinese-minus-Tibetan coverage differential is positive in every century bin before 600 and negative in every bin after 900; coverage guard: at least 30 works per stratum, else inconclusive.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill (not yet built): a three-column concordance - GRETIL Sanskrit work with scholarly composition date, Chinese canonical number located via CBETA, Tibetan number located via the Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons (Ui, Suzuki, Kanakura, Tada; Tohoku Imperial University, 1934) - counting canonical presence per century of composition.
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 valve picture — early Indic works richly present in the Chinese canon, the mature tantras and the Kalacakra corpus present in the Tibetan canon and largely absent from the Chinese — is textbook Buddhology, and the Tohoku catalogue pinned for the kill is the standard instrument on the Tibetan side. The pinned three-column concordance by century of composition has not been built, so the coverage-differential census is real, decidable work. Factual caution amounting to an error: the claim describes the Song translation bureau (982-c.1082) as 'largely retranslating', but Sen's study documents that the bureau produced a substantial number of first translations of late Indic esoteric texts — the Hevajra Tantra entered Chinese in the 1050s as T. 892 — which both misdescribes the bureau's output and puts the 'at most 10 percent' Chinese-share pin for 950-1250 compositions genuinely at risk rather than safely guaranteed. Adjacent, with the mischaracterization flagged.
Sources cited by the triage
- Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.
- Tansen Sen, “The Revival and Failure of Buddhist Translations during the Song Dynasty,” T'oung Pao 88 (2002). — The Song bureau's new esoteric translations, against the claim's 'largely retranslating'.
- Hakuju Ui, Munetada Suzuki, Yensho Kanakura, and Tokan Tada (eds.), A Complete Catalogue of the Tibetan Buddhist Canons, Tohoku Imperial University, 1934.
Predictions
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