[citation needed] If the student does not have a relationship with the monastic teacher and the ceremony is a public one with a congregation present, their new name will tend to reflect the lineage/tradition rather than the individual person.
In Burmese Buddhism, Dhamma names (bwe) are in Pali and chosen by the head monk of the monastery in which one is ordained.
This is the system used by Bhante Gunaratana when giving Dharma names to his students at Bhavana Society of West Virginia.
In China, ordained monks and nuns automatically revert to using the surname "Shì" (釋) as in Shijiamouni (釋迦牟尼), the Chinese transliteration of Shakyamuni Buddha.
In the Shaolin Temple, each subsequent generation takes the first part of their given name from a 70-character poem written by Xueting Fuyu.
[7] For example, the 32nd character in the poem is "xíng" (行), and all Shaolin Temple monks and disciples of that generation take a name starting with Shi Xing.
[12] The composition of the dharma name varies, although generally it must be composed of characters found in the Buddhist sutras.
[13] Specific schools and temples will sometimes have additional conventions: for example, names from Ji-Shu temples in Ippen are typically a single syllable suffixed with 阿 (short for 阿弥陀仏, Amitābha Buddha), and names from the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism can be one or two ideographs suffixed with 陽(Yō which means sun and relates to Rev.Koyō Kubose) In the Sanbo Kyodan tradition, the names usually consist of three ideographs : a unique Kanji, followed by the ‘Un(cloud 雲) symbol and ending with either the suffix -an 庵 for women or -ken 軒 for men.