On Arhat: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Arhat, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Arhat to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is अर्हत्, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Arhat.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'UHR-hut' — short vowels throughout; the h is a voiced breath between the syllables, and the final t is pure dental, not English 't'. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form arhat differs from the canonical Arhat only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for arat: it comes from the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds, and it fails because rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The Jaina sister-tradition used the same title in parallel: every tīrthaṅkara is an arhat, and the two śramaṇa movements argued over who deserved the word — evidence that it belonged to the age, not to one sect. Mahāyāna sūtras, building the rival bodhisattva ideal, chastised the arhat's "selfish" release (the Lotus Sūtra likens the arhat vehicle to a burning house escaped too soon), yet kept the title for the Buddha himself and for Śāriputra, whose "future Buddhahood" the Lotus explicitly prophesies.
And it never stopped working. The arhat's afterlife is the afterlife of the Theragāthā — a book of verses by the first saints, still chanted in Pāli lands, among the oldest autobiographies in the world. Chinese temples fill halls with lohan: the Five Hundred Arhats of Beijing's Biyun Si and the sixteen of Hangzhou's Jingshan Si are national treasures; Guanxiu's originals survive in Japan, designated national treasures there too.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Arhat is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form arhat shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Arhat stands at /arhat/.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, arat first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10), Sāriputta Sutta (SN 47.19), Kevaṭṭa Sutta (DN 11).
The Register Continues
The register holds 548 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Árgos (read it) · next entry: Arinna (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.