The register rules: Guānyīn

Court is in session. In the matter of Guānyīn, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Guānyīn
• Original script: 觀音
• Pantheon: Chinese
• Convention: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 95 of 287

The Charge

That the name Guānyīn is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.

The Defense of the Canonical Form

The name is attested as 觀音, on the evidence Lotus Sutra and Chinese Buddhist canon set down. On the evidence, it means "Perceiver of sounds". The canonical transliteration is Guānyīn.

Every mark is evidence, and every piece of evidence is checkable:

• a → ā — Long vowel: the vowel length, as the sources give it.
• i → ī — Long vowel: the vowel length, as the sources give it.

The Character Witness

The plain form guanyin is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.

What the fallback status forbids is promotion: guanyin may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → ā, i → ī — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Cross-Examination

The witness Guanyin

Where it comes from: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Why it cannot stand: every substitution here (ā→a, ī→i) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Mitigating Circumstances

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Guānyīn. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

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: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u. 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.

Registration, Honestly

Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.

Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.

The Verdict

So the register finds: Guānyīn, canonical; guanyin, a sanctioned fallback; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /sites/guanyin/.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Guanyin first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: a → ā, i → ī; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Lotus Sutra, Chinese Buddhist canon, Chinese Buddhist texts.

The Register Continues

Entry 95 of 287 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.

Continue the register — previous entry: Guāndì (read it) · next entry: Hádēs (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.