The canon's trunk is buried at Dunhuang

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The Tibetan Buddhist canon survives in two great transmission lines, Tshalpa and Thempangma, both attested centuries after the Tibetan translations sealed at Dunhuang. Join the cave to the canon stemmatically: if the later Kanjur descends from imperial-period exemplars rather than from re-translation, Dunhuang witnesses should sit upstream of the split — agreeing with the reconstructable archetype against each line's separate innovations rather than siding with either line. Institutions rarely re-translate what an empire already standardized, because retranslation is expensive and doctrinally risky; they copy. If this holds, the cave is not a provincial branch library but a sample of the canon's trunk, and existing collations can be re-read as measurements of how far the received canon drifted from its ninth-century state.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For canonical texts attested both at Dunhuang and in collated Kanjur witnesses, the Dunhuang readings agree with the stemmatic archetype against line-specific innovations at more than 70% of the variation points where the two main lines diverge. Primary clause: the over-70% archetype-agreement rate pooled over the sampled texts; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

rKTs (Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies) collation data, joined to the Dunhuang witnesses of the same texts in OTDO and IDP.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind in a single Write by a fresh instance with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Collating Dunhuang witnesses against Tshalpa and Thempangma lines is an active method — phylogenetic analyses of individual sutras place Dunhuang manuscripts relative to the transmission groups — but the pooled archetype-agreement rate (>70% at divergence points) across the rKTs collation corpus has not been computed as a general test.

An Old Tibetan Dunhuang Manuscript of the Avaivartikacakrasutra (phylogenetic analysis with Kanjur lines)
rKTs collation resources; Nesar and Lang Kanjurs report, Religions 16(9):1205

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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