Mañjuśrī — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

The internet spells Mañjuśrī more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Mañjuśrī
• Original script: मञ्जुश्री
• Pantheon: Buddhist
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 155 of 287

The Canonical Form

The attested form is मञ्जुश्री, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Mañjuśrī.

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

• n → ñ — Stress on n: the stress position, as the sources give it.
• i → ī — Long vowel: the vowel length, as the sources give it.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form manjushri 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: manjushri may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — n → ñ, i → ī — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

The Register of False Forms

False form 1: Mañjuśri

Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself.

Violation: every substitution here (ī→i) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

The Contested Forms

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the tradition’s standard — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Mañjuśrī. 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: 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.

What the Address Bar Allows

IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.

That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.

Where the Name Stood First

His mountain is the monument: Wǔtái shān preserves the Nanchan temple (782) and the Foguang temple's East Hall (857) — the two oldest surviving timber halls in China — on the terraces pilgrims have climbed for fifteen centuries. The Kathmandu valley keeps his founding stroke in stone and water: the Chobhar gorge through which the lake drained, and the Svayambhū stūpa on its hill, eyes painted and sword remembered. His certain images emerge in the early centuries CE and multiply along the Silk Road; by the Pāla period the sword-and-book type was fixed, and it has not changed since. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.

The Verdict

The register rules for Mañjuśrī, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. manjushri is the sanctioned fallback for systems without marks — a vehicle, never the scholarly primary. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /sites/manjushri/ enforces it.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Mañjuśri first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: n → ñ, i → ī; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Vimalakīrti Sūtra, Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (Lotus Sūtra), Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti.

The Register Continues

This is one of 287 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.

Continue the register — previous entry: Manannán (read it) · next entry: Māra (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.