Excuse Me, Your Name is ?
February 9, 2010 Question: Is your name spelled Wu Lin or Wu Ling?
Response: Okay, you'd think this was an easy one to answer. I mean, clearly this is an "a" or "b" type question. Right?
Would it were so.
Actually, it's a long story. You could say it began about 2000 years.
From Changing Destiny:
In the past, Chinese people might have three sets of names [in addition to their surname]: a given name, courtesy name, and sobriquet. Their given name that was given to them by their parents expressed the parent’s aspirations for their children. Changing this name was tantamount to ignoring this aspiration, truly an unfilial act.
Upon reaching adulthood, age twenty for males and sixteen for females, people were no longer addressed by the given name for to do so was disrespectful. At this time, they underwent a ceremony to be initiated into adulthood. During this ceremony, people of the same generation or older like siblings, schoolmates, and friends, would provide the courtesy name that would be used for the rest of their lives.
. . . Only one’s parents and teacher would use a person's given name after they reached adulthood; even grandparents, uncles, and emperors used the courtesy name. Thus, society accorded the same gratitude and respect to teachers as it did to parents.
In this spirit of different names to be used by different people, Buddhists monastics in China received two sets of names. When I and my brothers (both monks and nuns) were tonsured by our Teacher, Ven. Master Chin Kung, he gave each of us our two sets of names. The names that people know us by all begin with "Wu."
Okay, now let's look again at one sentence from Changing Destiny:
Only one’s parents and teacher would use a person's given name after they reached adulthood. . . .
Since one's Teacher gives one the name, in my case Wu Ling, only my Teacher can call me by that name. Not even my brothers can use it. They say Wu Ling shi, essentially Brother Wu Ling. (In case you're thinking here, well then her name is "Wu Ling! What's with the long explanation?" please bear with me as we leave China and move to the West.)
First, Lin or Ling? Actually, that has less to do with East or West and more with spelling. It should have been spelled Lin. But somehow it ended up being spelled Ling. After getting used to Ling, while living in Singapore I learned it should have been Lin. Oops.
So for a while I used "Lin." But apparently, I had become attached to Ling. (Oops, again,) So I changed it back to Ling.
A few years later, I began to spend more time in the US again. This became a problem because in Singapore, people know not to address a Buddhist monastic as "Wu Ling" but as Venerable Wu Ling, etc. In the west, naturally people didn't know this. They were understandable happy and relieved to remember my name, much less get into all the proper protocol of addressing me. (Or proper pronunciation. It's natural for westerners to pronounce Wu as "woo" not "oo")
So people called me "Wu." :-) Or more formally, Ms. Ling.
Clearly, these nice people needed some assistance.
So I went with the pinyin convention of combining the two names into one: Wuling.
Then I started signing my name as Venerable Wuling to help people know how to say hello without my wincing over being addressed as only my teacher should address me. Also, this would help people know how to address other monastics. If I winced at "Wuling," they must have really winced at "Wu ..."
So, bottom line, I spell it "Wuling."
Reader Comments (1)
Thank you!