Six weeks.Lhug-Pa wrote:About how long would it take a Dzogchen practitioner who is between lower and medium scope at best regarding their capacity—yet who also has average or slightly-above-average intellectual-faculties—to learn Tibetan well enough in order to at least 'somewhat grasp' the sense of what is written in the 17 (+2) Dzogchen Upadesha Tantra's?
(Assuming that one has to give no more than say 30 to 45 hours a week of their total time to a job and/or non-Tibetan-related schooling)
You can learn to read Tibetan in a day, get good at it in a week, and start hacking through a word-by-word translation, but sentence structure is very different and that says nothing about grasping the wisdom beyond the words. The little bits I can make sense of are generally reflecting something I've learned from my teachers, but YMMV. The seventeen tantras are certainly an amazing treasure, but it seems many great practitioners in Tibet would have had limited access to them at best, relying more on the student-teacher relationship and actual practice for a very long time vs perusing them to try to learn from them.
I suppose I lean a bit more conservative on the whole but now that we have a couple of post-diaspora practitioners in the West, it really is time to translate even the most inner texts, with the hopes they get used properly.