Two rival churches remember the same forgetting

Claim (verbatim)

The Jains canonized the memory of their own textual loss. The fourteen Pūrvas — the tradition's claimed oldest stratum — were already gone when the surviving scriptures were fixed, and both sects transmit a stepwise decay schedule: knowledge-classes descending from Bhadrabāhu, the last śrutakevalin (complete knower), through diminishing Pūrva-knowers to extinction. Śvetāmbaras carry it in the Kalpasūtra's Sthavirāvalī and the Valabhī redaction narrative (the canon written down, by the tradition's own count, roughly 980 years after Mahāvīra, expressly so that it not perish); Digambaras in the śrutāvatāra frame of the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama — Dharasena at Girnar dictating the last Pūrva-derived fragment, a text that then survived a millennium in a single Mūḍabidrī temple library. Agreement across a schism is a dating instrument: architecture shared by both sects predates the split and records a real event; the divergent parts are later sectarian infill. Prediction: comparing the published Śvetāmbara succession lists with the Digambara paṭṭāvalīs, both will agree on Bhadrabāhu as the terminal complete-knower and on an ordered decline through the same ranked knowledge-classes, while the post-Bhadrabāhu teacher names will overlap by under 20% (primary clause: the conjunction — shared decline architecture with near-disjoint personnel; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Kalpasūtra Sthavirāvalī (Jacobi's edition, and translation in Sacred Books of the East 22), the Digambara paṭṭāvalīs published by Hoernle (Indian Antiquary 20-21, 1891-1892), and the śrutāvatāra narrative in the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama-Dhavalā edition (Amraoti/Solapur, 1939-).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: comparing the published Śvetāmbara succession lists with the Digambara paṭṭāvalīs, both will agree on Bhadrabāhu as the terminal complete-knower and on an ordered decline through the same ranked knowledge-classes, while the post-Bhadrabāhu teacher names will overlap by under 20% (primary clause: the conjunction — shared decline architecture with near-disjoint personnel; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Kalpasūtra Sthavirāvalī (Jacobi's edition, and translation in Sacred Books of the East 22), the Digambara paṭṭāvalīs published by Hoernle (Indian Antiquary 20-21, 1891-1892), and the śrutāvatāra narrative in the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgama-Dhavalā edition (Amraoti/Solapur, 1939-).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Both sects' loss narratives — Bhadrabahu as terminal complete-knower and a stepwise decline through ranked knowledge-classes — and the divergence of the two teacher lineages after Bhadrabahu are standard Jainology (Dundas; the pattavalis Hoernle published). The specific conjunction has never been scored: shared decline architecture quantified against an under-20% overlap of post-Bhadrabahu personnel.

• P. Dundas, The Jains (2nd ed., Routledge, 2002), ch. on the scriptures and the loss of the Purvas
• A.F.R. Hoernle, Digambara pattavali editions, Indian Antiquary 20-21 (1891-1892)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.