The canonical register: Kubera
Evidence dossier 288 — Kubera. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Kubera
- Original script: कुबेर
- Pantheon: Sanskrit
- Convention: IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 288 of 597
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is कुबेर, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Kubera.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form kubera differs from the canonical Kubera 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.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Kubera’s images ride the northern walls of every medieval Hindu temple as lokapāla; the Ajanta and Ellora caves give him early monumental form. In Nepal and Tibet his Jambhala bronzes are among the most produced ritual objects of the last millennium.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Every Indian shopkeeper’s ‘Kubera’s pot’ and every temple’s treasure-vault under his image keep his cult domestic and current. His name entered the vocabulary of plenty across Southeast Asia — the Khmer temples guard their riches under his northern gaze — and Jambhala thangkas remain among Tibetan art’s most beloved subjects.
The Convention's Own History
Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Kubera: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form kubera is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /kubera/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Rāmāyaṇa, Uttara Kāṇḍa (Laṅkā’s golden age), Mahābhārata (the Pushpaka car), Śiva and Skanda Purāṇas (the northern guardianship).
The Register Continues
Entry 288 of 597 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: Kṣitigarbha (read it) · next entry: Kumano (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.