Borrowed Likeness

Translation strain does not measure a relationship between two traditions; it measures how easily a comparer can map one onto the other. That ease is confounded with historical contact, because the very things that lower strain (a shared lineage, a borrowed dialectic, a common translator, or homogenized modern spiritual vocabulary) are themselves traces of contact. So low strain cannot be read as evidence of independent recurrence; in entangled traditions it is a fingerprint of borrowing and should raise suspicion of contact rather than lower it. The Gaudapada case shows the trap directly: Advaita and Madhyamaka sit at low strain on the non-origination dialectic precisely because Gaudapada borrowed it, while they sit at high strain on the self because they fought over it for centuries. Both magnitudes are products of historical contact, not of independence. Therefore strain magnitude carries no evidential weight about whether a convergence is independent; independence must be established by external historical evidence (dating, transmission routes, translator biographies, polemical records), never inferred from strain itself.

Earlier work added a provenance check as a second field beside strain, treating the two as independent inputs to be coded separately and summed. This says they are causally confounded: contact is a common cause of low strain, so a low-strain reading systematically manufactures false positives for independent convergence in exactly the cases that matter, those with shared teachers, shared translators, or perennialist English vocabulary. Historical linguistics already abandoned surface similarity as evidence of common origin for this precise reason; translation-strain weighting quietly reintroduces the pre-comparative-method error of mistaking loanword resemblance for cognate descent. The new move is not to add a gate but to invert the sign of the primary signal: among traditions that could have been in contact, lower strain should lower confidence in independent convergence until provenance is settled.

The negation lens I used distorts: neti-neti rewards ontological purity and makes borrowing look like contamination, when for a practitioner it is irrelevant who invented a dialectic if the practice works. A deeper objection: historical independence is not the same as truth. Two traditions could borrow from each other and both still be right, so demoting borrowed convergences risks confusing the genealogy of an idea with its validity. The strongest anomaly that would weaken the claim: genuinely independent, pre-contact, geographically isolated traditions that nonetheless show low strain on a claim unit. If such cases are real and replicate, then once provenance is externally controlled, low strain does carry weak positive signal, and the confound is partial rather than total. Finally, the linguistics analogy may overfit: phonemes adapt by mechanical rules, but concepts are reinterpreted, so 'low strain by design' may operate differently for doctrine than for loanwords.