A fluffy little dog with a pushed-in face and a topknot sits in a show ring in a modern pet catalogue. Its breed name is "Shih Tzu." Almost nobody who coos at it knows that the name is a fossil — that the Shih in "Shih Tzu" is the same character that once meant Lion, the title of the Buddha's roar, the name of a fighting-and-meditation art carried out of India by monks. Somewhere along the centuries the word for the king of beasts slid down the social ladder until it landed on a toy dog. Dukes treats this slide as a worked example. Watch one word lose its meaning across a thousand years and you learn exactly how a martial tradition loses its memory of itself.1
This page tracks a single chain of words and characters as Dukes traces it through Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The chain has three movements. First, the word Lion — Sanskrit Simha — gets carried into Chinese, where its written character mutates over centuries until it ends up, absurdly, naming a breed of small dog. Second, the "Lion art" — the body-method the Lion-monks practiced — collects a long shelf of Chinese school-names, every one of them built from the Lion-word and none of them named after a teacher. Third, the inner principles of that art — Sanskrit Viddhi, the practice of a Vidya or esoteric art, where Vidya literally means "light" — get translated and transliterated through Chinese into the Japanese suffix -jitsu, the same -jitsu that today merely means "trick" or "method" in Jujitsu.2
Dukes's point is not philological trivia. It is that the words still carry their history if you know how to read them, and that the decay of the words mirrors the decay of the thing. The Lion became a lap-dog. The "light" became a "trick." In both cases something sacred shrank into something domestic, and the speakers stopped noticing.
Take the Lion-word first, because Dukes lays the steps out cleanly. The earliest Chinese scriptures wrote Simha phonetically, using the characters Seng plus Chia — sounds that, at the time, came closest to the Sanskrit.3 That Seng particle was awkwardly close in form to the Seng used for Sangha, the order of monks — already a confusion waiting to happen. Later the phonetic Seng for "Lion" was dropped and replaced by Shih, a character that actually meant Lion in Chinese. The earliest Shih was built from two roots: the radical for "Wild" plus a particle for "military." Wild plus military — Dukes reads the pairing as a portrait of the beast itself.4
Then a second swap. In medieval times the character for Shih (Lion) was replaced by a different Shih — same sound, different radical — that meant "teacher."5 The Lion quietly became the master. And then the final indignity: the everyday word for "lion" in Chinese and Japanese stopped being one character at all and became two, Shih Tzu (Japanese: Shishi), meaning a "child" or "person" of a Shih. The suffix Tzu had originally been added to mean a "child" or "person" of the Buddha — a monk. Somewhere it got misread as meaning a literal lion cub, and from there it got slapped onto a breed of small dogs.6 A title for monks, run through three centuries of copyists, ends up on a pet.
This page hands the rest of the Dukes corpus a working method: read the word to date the layer. Bodhidharma: The Revisionist Biography watches a person inflate into a legend across the sources; this page watches a word deflate across the same sources, and the two motions are the same archaeology run in opposite directions — names accrete glory or shed it, and either way the layering is datable. It also props up Chuan Fa Transmission Lineage by supplying the actual Chinese school-names — Seng Cha Hsiu, Tung Shih Chuan, Shih Ch'ih Fo Fa — that the transmission claim depends on. And the Vidya-to--jitsu chain is the etymological spine under Vajramukti: Buddhist Martial Philosophy: the very suffix on "Jujitsu" is the worn-down ghost of the word for the esoteric "light" the art was built to carry.
The most quietly loaded passage is the list of Chinese names for the Lion's art. Dukes gives the roster: Seng Cha Hsiu (Lion art), Shih Hsing Hsiu Hsing (Lion's practice), Tung Shih Hsiu Hsing (Eastern Lion's practice), Tung Shih Chuan (Eastern Lion's closed hand), Tung Shih Shou (Eastern Lion's hand), Seng Shih Fu (Sangha Lion protector), Shih Ch'ih Fo Fa (holder of the Lion's protecting Dharma), and Fa Huo (Dharma protector).7
Read the list for what is missing. Not one name contains a person. Every name is built from the function — Lion, practice, hand, protector, Dharma — and none is built from a master's surname. Dukes draws the moral explicitly: "no proper Buddhist teacher would ever name the teaching or a school or group practicing it after his own name."8 Set that against the modern martial-arts world, where styles are routinely branded with the founder's name and lineage is a marketing asset. The old roster encodes a whole ethic in its grammar: the art belongs to the Buddha-function, not to the teacher, so the teacher's name has no business on it. The naming convention is the anti-ego doctrine made visible in ink — which is exactly why a later age that did name schools after men had already lost something the old names protected.
A reader has a modern karate manual open and a dictionary of Chinese Buddhist terms beside it. The manual says the style is "such-and-such -ryu," founded by Master so-and-so, and the word jitsu is glossed in a footnote as "art or technique." The reader stops on that footnote. Jitsu — where did the t come from? She traces it back. The Japanese -jitsu came from a Chinese transliteration, Hsiu; the Chinese had translated a Sanskrit word two ways at once, literally as Ming ("light") and phonetically as Hsiu; the Sanskrit was Viddhi, the practice of a Vidya, and Vidya means "light."9 So the suffix she has been reading as "technique" once meant the esoteric light the practice carried. She writes in the margin: "jitsu = light, hollowed out." Then she looks again at the founder's name stamped across the cover and remembers that the oldest names for this art carried no founder at all. Two small acts of reading, and the manual now reads like a tombstone with the inscription half weathered off.
The textual base is Dukes's Notes 37b and the closing note of the Lion-art section. The Lion-character chain (Simha → Seng-Chia → Shih "wild+military" → Shih "teacher" → Shih Tzu the dog) is internally detailed and the kind of claim a Sinologist could in principle check against the standard character dictionaries Dukes cites — Soothill and Houdous's Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, Eitel's Sanskrit–Chinese Dictionary.11 That makes the character-evolution claim relatively checkable. What is not independently checkable is the roster of Lion-art school-names and the Viddhi → Vidya → Ming/Hsiu → Jitsu derivation: those rest on Dukes's own reading, and the claim that early Japanese arts arrived "complete with their esoteric content intact" is exactly the kind of statement his temple's privately-held manuscripts underwrite and outsiders cannot. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] on the full nomenclature chain; [VERIFIED]-adjacent on the Shih-Tzu-dog folk etymology, which is widely attested.
Open: Dukes asserts the Lion-art names "indicate a practice coming directly from the Lion art of India." The names encode a Lion-theme; whether that proves direct Indian transmission, or only a shared Buddhist Lion-symbol independently adopted, the passage does not separate.
Reading this beside the vault's critical-historical corpus is instructive precisely because the two camps would agree on the method and split on the warrant. Geoffrey Samuel would happily accept the Lion-character archaeology — watching a term mutate across datable textual layers is his own bread and butter, the same move he runs on yoga's vocabulary. He and Dukes converge on the principle that words are dateable strata. They part at the etymology that matters most to Dukes — the Viddhi → Jitsu chain that makes Japanese martial arts the worn-down inheritors of an Indian esoteric "light." Samuel would ask for one corroborating text outside Kongoryuji's cupboard; Dukes answers with his lineage. White, working on sinister yogis, would relish the content of the decay — the sacred Lion-art shrinking into a folk amusement (the New Year Lion Dance, the toy dog) is exactly the kind of demotion-of-the-numinous his material tracks. The convergence everyone shares: names are not neutral labels but compressed history, and a tradition that forgets its own etymology has already begun to forget its own practice.
Manas Self-Looping and Pudgalabhava — the roster-with-no-founders is the anti-ego doctrine wearing a grammar. The Manas page describes how the self is manufactured by a consciousness that keeps taking its own activity as its object — self-reference thickening into a felt "I." The old Buddhist naming convention is that exact diagnosis applied to institutions: no teacher names the art after himself, because to do so is to let the auto-referencing loop run at the scale of a school. A style branded with a founder's surname is Pudgalabhava in organizational form — the lineage looping back on a personal center instead of pointing at the impersonal Dharma. Neither domain alone produces the insight: the consciousness theory gives the mechanism of self-positing, and the nomenclature history gives a real, datable case of a culture engineering against that mechanism in its own labelling rules — and then losing the discipline, exactly when school-names start carrying men's names. Read together they predict a tell: watch when an art's names shift from function to founder, and you are watching the ego-loop colonize a tradition in real time.
Vajramukti: Buddhist Martial Philosophy — Vajramukti claims the art exists to dismantle the self rather than arm it, and that its esoteric content is what distinguishes it from mere fighting. This page supplies the philological receipt. The suffix -jitsu once meant Vidya, "light," the esoteric principle itself; in most modern Japanese mouths it means only "trick" or "method." So the word's decay is a measurable index of exactly the loss Vajramukti warns about — the moment the "light" drops out of the name is the moment the art becomes technique without doctrine. The combined insight, available from neither side alone: the Vajramukti thesis that "an art either knows what it is or it is a fighting style with belts" can be dated, not just asserted, by tracking when the esoteric morphemes fall out of a tradition's vocabulary. Etymology becomes a diagnostic instrument for spiritual hollowing-out.
Sharpest implication: the present meaning of a martial word is its eroded meaning, not its true one — and the erosion is legible. Every "-jitsu," "-do," and "-ryu" in a modern dojo is a sediment layer, and reading the layers tells you what the art has forgotten about itself.
Generative questions: