A thousand paths narrow to the coasts

Claim (verbatim)

Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya opens with the tradition's own census of itself: twenty-one śākhās of the Ṛgveda, one hundred and one of the Yajurveda, a thousand-pathed Sāmaveda, nine of the Atharvaveda. What survives with living recitation is about a dozen — better than ninety-five percent extinction inside the most heavily error-corrected transmission system ever built. Extinction on that scale has a geography. The Gangetic heartland, where the schools were densest, is where patronage shifts and curricular consolidation bit hardest; survivors should sit at the edges, like relict species in refugia — the Jaiminīya Sāmaveda in Kerala and Tamil pockets, the Paippalāda Atharvaveda alive in Odisha (famously rediscovered there in living recitation by Durgamohan Bhattacharyya), Kaṭha remnants in Kashmir, Taittirīya and Kāṇva strongholds in the far south. The lost thousand paths are unrecoverable; the map of the survivors is the fossil of how they died. Prediction: mapping every śākhā with a documented unbroken recitation lineage in the Kashikar-Parpola survey, at least three-quarters will have their attested strongholds outside the Gangetic core (Uttar Pradesh-Bihar), the core will retain no śākhā that is absent from the periphery, and at least one peripheral region will retain a śākhā extinct everywhere else (primary clause: the three-quarters peripheral-stronghold share; the verdict follows it). Kill: C. G. Kashikar and Asko Parpola, "Śrauta Traditions in Recent Times," in Frits Staal (ed.), Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, vol. II (Berkeley, 1983), cross-checked against Michael Witzel's śākhā-localization studies ("The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools," in Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts, Harvard Oriental Series Opera Minora 2, 1997).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: mapping every śākhā with a documented unbroken recitation lineage in the Kashikar-Parpola survey, at least three-quarters will have their attested strongholds outside the Gangetic core (Uttar Pradesh-Bihar), the core will retain no śākhā that is absent from the periphery, and at least one peripheral region will retain a śākhā extinct everywhere else (primary clause: the three-quarters peripheral-stronghold share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: C. G. Kashikar and Asko Parpola, "Śrauta Traditions in Recent Times," in Frits Staal (ed.), Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, vol. II (Berkeley, 1983), cross-checked against Michael Witzel's śākhā-localization studies ("The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools," in Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts, Harvard Oriental Series Opera Minora 2, 1997).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The peripheral survival of the living sakhas — Jaiminiya in Kerala and Tamil pockets, Paippalada in Odisha, Katha remnants in Kashmir, against a largely emptied Gangetic core — is exactly what the Kashikar-Parpola survey documents and Witzel's localization studies map qualitatively. The three-quarters-peripheral quantification with an explicit core/periphery partition and the relict-refugium tests has not been computed.

• C.G. Kashikar and A. Parpola, 'Srauta Traditions in Recent Times', in F. Staal (ed.), Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, vol. II (Berkeley, 1983)
• M. Witzel, 'The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools', in Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts (Harvard Oriental Series Opera Minora 2, 1997)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.