Counsel, Judgement, and the Formation of Mind in Middle Persian Wisdom Literature

This article reads Middle Persian wisdom literature as a discipline of intellectual formation. It argues that counsel, aphoristic compression, question-answer exchange, attribution, number, memory, and transmitted instruction do more than preserve ethical sayings: they shape the conditions under which judgement can be learned, retained, tested, and carried into conduct. The discussion focuses on Mēnōg ī Xrad, Dēnkard VI, the andarz traditions associated with Ādurbād ī Mahrspandān and Ōšnar ī Dānāg, and related Pahlavi, Arabic-mediated, and later Persian materials. The article treats the layered transmission of the corpus through Sasanian memory, post-Sasanian Zoroastrian preservation, manuscript survival, Persian and Arabic mediation, and modern philological reconstruction as part of the intellectual history of the material itself. This version is an open-access working paper / preprint and has not undergone peer review. A revised version may later be prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.