Ajahn Amaro said once mentioned that Sri Lankans would tell him his name should be “Amara”. Apparently some giggle at him when they hear his name. He said this is a difference in Thai understanding and pronounciation of Pali vs Sri Lankan rather than a gender one (I think, I am not a Pali expert at all).
My name is Mara (with a long first a). It is a traditional Latvian female name.
Whenever I read about Mara in Buddhist texts I am always surprised that it is a male 
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Hmm one of our female SL supporters is called Amara, but maybe it’s Amaraa?
On the topic of gender of Mara, I had always chanted the English version of Mangala Sutta as
Then in the dark of the night a radiant deva illuminated all of Jettas Grove
she bowed down low before the blessed one, then standing to one side she said…
Then in the chanting book at Newbury the deva was male. 
Then I thought about the Pālī. It is deva not devi.
Why do the devas have gender anyway? 
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Perhaps in this expression dāra is referring to what is man’s; his wife, thus masculine.
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Does this mean your dharma name doesn’t mean something along the lines of “well-born”?
I had assumed su+jāti as the basis for it.
Hmm … no racial undertones - or just Ariyan!! 
Just kidding!
with metta
Its a relatively common name. Anyone named “Kevin” is named “well-born” in Irish, it comes from Caoimhghín (my own name).
Caoimh is cognate with the English “comely”. Ghín is cognate with the English gene, or the Latin genus.
Ireland means “Arian land” (!)
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Not sure if it is true, but I have heard “Ireland” “Iran” “Armenia” all stem from the term “Ariyan” 
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The others, definitely, but not so sure about Armenia. Armenia is an exonym. They call it Hayastan. Could still be related to “ariya” though.
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Never heard the one about Arian Land before (and I’m living here 
). In school, we learned that Éire, Banbha and Fódhla were three ancient names of Ireland (names of goddesses/queens of the Tuatha Dé Danann, which became the Aos Sí, the Irish fairies: our version of devas I suppose). Éire is the usual Irish name for Ireland. But, I guess it is an Indo-European language, so the root of Éire, I’d well believe, might well lead back to the similar-sounding Arian! Cool!
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Éire was the daughter of a king wasn’t she? A holy king or an elf/sídhe king or something?
Check out the genitive of her name (i.e. “Eire’s”): its Éireann. The word “Arian” is also descended from what used to be a genitive case afaik. The relation is more clear now. Her name was “of the Ariya” meaning “of the nobility”. Afaik at least. This wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.
It should be noted that scholars of linguistics are actually somewhat divided on the origins of the name of Ireland.
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Yes, they were three sisters. The Tuatha Dé Danann were portrayed as a magical race (kind of semi-divine). The story is that, despite their powers, they were defeated by the Milesians (supposed ancestors of the current Irish), and the agreement was that the Milesians would take the world above and they’d take the world below (the Otherworld) and retreated into the old burial mounds, the Sídhe (from which they take their name). There was a lot of superstition associated with ‘fairy forts’ (such ancient mounds) and certain ‘fairy trees’ (supposedly there’d be extreme bad luck from damaging or interfering with such things).
There are certain similarities between the Tuatha Dé Danann and Tolkien’s elves (he used to travel over to the University in Galway quite a bit as an external examiner, so this was probably one of the mythologies that influenced him).
It’s an interesting theory anyway! Often hard to be every certain on these types of things. Thanks anyway.
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I suspect it is a bit of both. You see, in every language, for which there is a dictionary, for every word there exist the so-called ‘citation form’, i.e. the form of the word that you find in a dictionary. For example, in any respectable Latin dictionary, the verbs are cited in the first person singular of the present indicative tense instead of the infinitive, e.g. habeō ‘to have’. The reasons for choosing the citation form are sometimes pragmatical (e.g. 3rd p. sing. praes. ind. makes a lot more sense for Pali and Sanskrit than the infinitive), and sometimes historical (e.g. Russian adjectives are cited in Nom. sing. masc., while there are only few meaningful reasons to not provide them in fem. or neut.).
For the overwhelming majorities of the modern languages the citation form is generally Nominative singular, and the Ancient Indo-Aryan languages present a major exception to this rule. The citation form for Sanskrit and Pali nouns most of the time are not actual forms used in the language but rather so-called ‘declension stems’, i.e. reconstructed noun stems used in declension. For example, dhamma as a noun is masculine and is therefore declined as dhammo, dhammassa, dhammāya, dhammaṃ, etc., whereas the citation form you find in Pali dictionaries is ‘dhamma’. As far as I remember (I may be mistaken here), the ancient Pali grammars preferred using Nom. Sing. (dhammo) as their citation form, but the European (presumably German) Indologists changed it to the stem form we are using now.
Now let us look at the citation forms different grammatical genders assume in modern dictionaries. Most masculine and neuter nouns end in -a (dhamma - masculine with Nom dhammo, ratana - neuter with Nom. ratanaṃ, etc.), most feminine nouns end in -ā (vijjā - feminine with Nom -ā). There are other models for obtaining citation forms (e.g. Bhagavant - Nom. Bhagavā, pitar - Nom. pitā, etc.), but they are unimportant for the current discussion.
Now, if you look at different naming conventions for monastics in different countries, you will see that the Sinhalese tradition uses the citation form for monks (e.g. Ñāṇavīra and not Ñāṇavīro, Gunaratana and not Gunaratanaṃ), and the Thai tradition prefers using the Nom. Sing. (Brahmavaṃso and not Brahmavaṃsa, Ñāṇasampanno and not Ñāṇasampanna, even Buddho as used in meditation and not Buddha). In other words, the Sri Lankan Buddhists will tend to perceive monastic names ending with -a as male, and grammatically speaking that makes a lot of sense. So, if you tend to be in mostly Sinhalese, it could be skilful to use the Pasannā (which can mean both ‘pleased, happily gladdened woman’ and ‘fermented liquor drink’, a great pun if you want to know my opinion 
) to avoid confusion, while I suspect it is much less critical in an English-speaking or Thai context.
I think it is because Bhante is mostly surrounded by Westerners of people of South-East Asian origin, who tend to perceive the -a ending as a marker of the grammatical femininity. Being named ‘Ilya’ (the -a ending is perfectly normal in Russian for male names and is dominant in informal name forms like Sasha for Aleksandr), I am constantly though to be a woman in e-mail communication here in Germany.
As the Pali dictionary states dāra is actually a collective noun meaning something like ‘women of the house / family’, ‘womanhood’. ‘Wife’ could actually be dārā. The collective meaning is thought to be the original one, in which case the grammatical gender makes much more sense (cf. German neuter noun Frauenzimmer, antiquated for ‘woman’, originally ‘women’s room and women inhabiting it’).
Sorry for this bit being a bit offtopic, but I just couldn’t help myself The full Greek cognate for sujata would be εὐγένιος (from εὖ < PIE *h₁su- ‘well’ + γένος ‘born’), whence the name Εὐγένιος. So, you could just as well call yourself Bhikkhu Eugene!
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Absolutely fabulous.
Nice, thanks!
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