Buddhist girls’ names
Names used across the Buddhist world — Pali and Sanskrit roots, and their forms in Thai, Tibetan, Burmese, Sinhala and Japanese.
Buddhist naming is unusual in this library because it crosses more unrelated language families than almost any other tradition while keeping a recognisable core.
That core is Pali and Sanskrit — dharma, karuna (compassion), metta (loving-kindness), shanti (peace), bodhi (awakening) — and it travelled with the teaching into Sinhala, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. In each of those it was adapted rather than borrowed intact, so the same underlying word can be almost unrecognisable between Colombo and Kyoto.
Tara is the clearest single case. She is a Sanskrit name meaning star, a Hindu goddess, and in Tibetan Buddhism the bodhisattva of compassion in female form — Drolma, one of the most widely given girls' names in Tibet. The same name, three traditions, three quite different figures.
Thai naming adds a layer that has no European parallel: most Thais carry a formal given name, often Pali-derived and quite long, alongside a short nickname used by everyone including colleagues. The formal name may be chosen with a monk's involvement; the nickname is frequently a fruit, an animal, or an English loanword.
Tibetan names are often given by a lama and may be a pair of religious terms with no fixed family element at all, which means Tibetan naming does not work like a surname system and should not be read as one.