Two distinct Syriac translations of Kalila wa-Dimna survive independently — one from the lost Pahlavi, one from the Arabic

The standard chain — Sanskrit → Borzuya's lost Pahlavi → Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's surviving Arabic (see claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi) — describes only one branch of the text's spread. The 2020 AnonymClassic critical-edition project (Jan J. van Ginkel's section) documents a second, parallel branch into Syriac that is not one translation but two, made independently of each other: one translated directly from the lost Pahlavi original — its translator named as "Budh the Periodeutes" in ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha's 14th-century Catalogue of Biblical and Ecclesiastical Books — and a second, separate Syriac translation made later (tenth or eleventh century, per van Ginkel) from the Arabic.

This means the Pahlavi original left at least two lines of descent before it was lost — the Arabic (via Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ) and this direct-to-Syriac line — rather than the single funnel the popular chain implies. It is also one concrete data point for how the AnonymClassic project models the text's "mouvance": not a single clean stemma but overlapping, sometimes independent, lines of transmission from a common lost ancestor.