Peripheral canons are refugee camps for readings

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 canon's mainstream lines were repeatedly edited at powerful central monasteries, while small local Kanjurs survived in peripheral valleys. Join textual criticism to the geography of power: central lines lose old readings twice over — once to editorial smoothing, once to the physical loss of exemplar diversity — so ancient readings should survive disproportionately at the edges, with peripheral witnesses siding with the ninth-century Dunhuang fragments against the received mainstream at a measurable rate. Variance flees power: where nobody important edits, nothing old gets corrected away. This is a structural claim about libraries that vanished between the ninth century and the canonical editions, read from the pattern of survivals. If it holds, stemmatic geography becomes an archaeology of lost collections, mapping extinct intermediate libraries from the distribution of readings alone.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict-bearing): in collations of texts also attested at Dunhuang, independent and peripheral Kanjur witnesses agree with Dunhuang readings against the united mainstream lines at a rate at least three times the reverse pattern (mainstream agreeing with Dunhuang against united peripherals); the verdict follows that ratio.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

rKTs (Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies) collation data for texts with Dunhuang witnesses, the latter via 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

Tauscher, Viehbeck and Laine's programme on peripheral/local Kanjurs explicitly investigates collections independent of the Tshalpa/Thempangma mainstream, and collations already compare such witnesses with Dunhuang manuscripts, anticipating the variance-flees-power direction; the 3x agreement-ratio test pooled over rKTs collations is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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