Seventeen graphs make a wage

Claim (verbatim)

Seventeen graphs make a wage. The standard sutra format — seventeen graphs per column, fixed columns per sheet — is best explained as piece-rate labor technology, not aesthetics or numerology. A fixed grid makes the sheet a unit of pay and audit: sheets-per-juan becomes predictable, a paymaster can price a commission from a catalogue's juan count alone, and a scribe paid by the sheet has nowhere to pad. If the grid is a wage instrument, its adoption should track the institutionalization of paid copying — tightest exactly where colophons attest professional production, loosest in private devotional copies, in every century.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Sample dated Dunhuang sutra copies from the 5th through 10th centuries and record graphs per column. Primary clause (verdict follows it): copies whose colophons attest official or professional production conform to the 17-graph standard (mode 17, tolerance zero) at a rate at least 30 percentage points higher than contemporaneous private devotional copies, in every century sampled. Secondary: corpus-wide conformity rises from under half of dated 5th-century copies to over 90 percent of 8th-century official copies.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: IDP images of dated Dunhuang sutra copies — column format is directly countable on the photographs, and production class is read from the same items' colophons.

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).

The format standard is textbook: the seventeen-graphs-per-column sutra grid became the national norm for scriptural transcription in the Northern and Southern Dynasties and defines the 'sutra-copying style' (xiejing ti), with real copies clustering at 17 (varying 16-19). Not located: the item's specific piece-rate-wage operationalization -- that conformity to the 17-graph mode tracks the institutionalization of PAID copying, running >=30 points higher in colophon-attested official/professional copies than in contemporaneous private devotional copies in every century, and rising corpus-wide from under half of dated 5th-century copies to over 90% of 8th-century official ones. The grid is established; the wage-instrument mechanism and the production-class conformity gradient are unrun.

• Yale University Art Gallery, sutra-script (fojing wen) note -- 'the standard number of seventeen characters to a column'; the xiejing ti scriptural style — The 17-graph column standard as an established codicological norm
• IDP images of dated Dunhuang sutra copies (column format countable; production class read from the same items' colophons) — The kill dataset for the conformity-by-production-class measurement

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.