Scholarship (via de Blois) treats Borzuya's Indian mission and authorship of the lost Pahlavi translation as historically plausible, not proven

Modern scholarship is careful to mark Borzuya's authorship of the lost Pahlavi translation and his reported voyage to India as a claim of the text itself, not an independently documented fact. The 2020 peer-reviewed AnonymClassic article (Freie Universität Berlin) chooses its verb carefully: Borzuya "allegedly translated the text from Sanskrit to Middle Persian," and his "voyage to India and intellectual biography are extensively recorded in two chapters of Kalīla and Dimna" — i.e. recorded inside the work's own frame-tale preface, the kind of source a historian treats as literary self-presentation rather than external testimony.

François de Blois's 1990 monograph — the standard scholarly treatment of exactly this question — reportedly goes further, concluding that "Burzoya's authorship of the Middle Persian version remains historically possible, because it can be neither proven nor falsified." De Blois is also credited with identifying five variant recensions of the frame-tale narrative, in each of which King Khosrow's vizier Bozorgmehr-Boḵtagān appears — a stable cast across retellings, which reads as a sign of a literary convention rather than a documentary record.

This nuances, without overturning, the transmission chain in claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi: the chain (Sanskrit → lost Pahlavi → surviving Arabic) is treated as settled, but who carried out the middle step, and how, remains an open question the field holds at "plausible," not "proven." It is also consistent with the apocryphal framing of claim-borzuya-immortality-herb-was-really-a-book.