Refuting the neighbor, not the canon

Claim (verbatim)

Refuting the neighbor, not the canon: Neo-Confucian anti-Buddhist polemic drew its knowledge of Buddhism almost entirely from Chan sayings literature rather than from sutras or scholastic treatises, because the literati met Buddhism socially — in conversation with Chan monks and through yulu circulating in elite networks — not through canon-reading. Polemic mirrors the sociology of contact, not the architecture of the rival's authority: the Buddhism the Confucians refuted was its most oral, least scriptural genre, and their picture of the entire tradition was set by it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Catalogue identifiable Buddhist quotations and named textual references in the Zhuzi yulei and Zhu Xi's collected prose. Primary clause: at least 70 percent of identifiable Buddhist textual material derives from Chan yulu and lamp-record literature (Linji lu, Jingde chuandeng lu, and kin) versus under 10 percent from translated Indian sutras and sastras; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the same distribution holds in the recorded sayings of the Cheng brothers a century earlier.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Kanripo and ctext.org machine-readable texts of the Zhuzi yulei, crossed against the CBETA canon for source identification of the quoted material.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

That the Neo-Confucian literati met Buddhism socially -- Zhu Xi studied Chan with the monk Dao Qian and engaged Dahui Zonggao, and his knowledge was Chan-inflected rather than canon-scholastic -- is a recognized reading, and the limitations of his grasp of scriptural/scholastic Buddhism are directly studied. Not located: the specific source-genre quantification the item stakes -- >=70% of identifiable Buddhist textual material in the Zhuzi yulei deriving from Chan yulu/lamp-records vs <10% from translated sutras/sastras, with the same pattern in the Cheng brothers -- as an executed count against CBETA.

• 'Zhu Xi's Grasp of Buddhism and its Limitations', Contemporary Chinese Thought 49:3-4 (2018) — Zhu Xi's Buddhism as Chan-derived and its scriptural limits
• 'Zhu Xi', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — His formation in Chan; the Zhuzi yulei as the record of his sayings

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.