Nézhā: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
Evidence dossier 171 — Nézhā. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Nézhā
- Original script: 哪吒
- 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. 171 of 287
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 哪吒, as Fēngshén Yǎnyì (Investiture of the Gods) and Wu Cheng'en, Xīyóujì (Journey to the West) preserve it. On the evidence, it means "Nezha (from Sanskrit Nalakuvara)". The canonical transliteration is Nézhā.
Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. e → é (Stress on e); a → ā (Long vowel). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.
Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form nezha 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: nezha may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — e → é, a → ā — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Nezha. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ā→a, é→e) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 5 — the physical record. Nézhā is a textual rather than an archaeological figure, and his attestation history tracks the Buddhist transmission itself. The name first appears in Tang-dynasty Buddhist translations as 那吒 (Nata), a transcription of Sanskrit Nalakūvara, son of the guardian king Vaiśravaṇa, whose cult flourished in Tang China and whose iconography — armor, spear, and reliquary pagoda — later passed to Nézhā's literary father, Li Jing. By the Song dynasty the flesh-and-bone-returning motif was current in Chan literature, and Yuan-era drama gave the child a stage life. The canonical narrative was fixed in the Ming novels: the Investiture of the Gods supplied the full cycle from flesh ball to lotus rebirth, and Journey to the West installed him as a marshal of the celestial court. Material attestation is chiefly cultic — temple statuary of the Marshal of the Central Altar, a wheel-riding, ring-bearing youth, across southeastern China, Taiwan, and the diaspora.
Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. No Chinese deity has had a stronger twenty-first century. Nézhā's cult thrives in Taiwan and the diaspora, where the Marshal of the Central Altar dances in temple processions — in recent decades to electronic music, the 'techno Nézhā' of modern festival culture.
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.
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 Nézhā: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form nezha rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. 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 /sites/nezha/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Nezha first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: e → é, a → ā; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Fēngshén Yǎnyì (Investiture of the Gods), Wu Cheng'en, Xīyóujì (Journey to the West), Nezha (encyclopedia entry).
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 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: Neptūnus (read it) · next entry: Nḫt (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.