The canonical register: Tantra
Evidence dossier 519 — Tantra. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Tantra
- Original script: तन्त्र
- 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. 519 of 597
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is तन्त्र, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Tantra.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form tantra differs from the canonical Tantra 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. Tantra leaves mandalas: the Borobudur’s galleries, the painted maṇḍala-halls of Alchi and Tabo, and the stūpa-temples of the Himalayan lineages. The colossal Hevajra and Cakrasaṃvara images of Khmer art are its royal monuments.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. The maṇḍala entered the world’s art-vocabulary; the mantra and the mudrā passed into global practice. Tantra’s academic rediscovery in the twentieth century rewrote the history of Hinduism and Buddhism — the ‘esoteric’ is now standard curriculum.
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 Tantra: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form tantra 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 /tantra/ 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 — Mālinīvijayottara and Svacchandatantra (early Śaiva systems), Hevajra Tantra and Guhyasamāja (Buddhist Vajrayāna), Sanderson, ‘Śaivism and Brahmanism’ (historical framework).
The Register Continues
Entry 519 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: Tangaroa (read it) · next entry: Tapas (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.