Spoken languages are clearly not his strong point. If he was anyone else apart from the Dalai Lama, would you expect someone who is expert and trained for many years in religious studies, or philosophy, or any other subject, say physics, or mathematics, to be an expert spoken linguist as well? They might be or they might not. Similarly they might or might not be an acrobat, or great at sprinting or at marathons. Even in sport, then Usain Bolt is expert at sprinting, and Mo Farah is expert at the marathon, neither would be much good at the other’s sports at the international level, and after a certain age they retire from their sport, indeed Usain Bolt has already retired. There’s nobody who is champion of all sports or all intellectual endeavours either. The top Go player is not the same person as the top Chess player.

He was recognized from a young age as someone with deep understanding of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, he passed his Geshe Lharumpa degree, which normally takes fifteen years of study as a young man in his early twenties. Since then he has mastered the teachings of all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He’s widely recognized by the Tibetan teachers themselves, and by Western academics too, as expert in Tibetan Buddhism. But he is not widely recognized as an expert in spoken languages or a polyglot. He is reasonably fluent, able to speak and be understood, but his grammar isn’t that good, his sentences are still somewhat fragmentary, and he doesn’t have a huge vocabulary in English and still sometimes needs to ask for translations of some of the less used words in our language. What’s the contradiction there?

I think perhaps it’s due to this kind of mystique, that he’s supposed by many Westerners to have “mystical powers”, to be able to foresee the future, to be some kind of a superman. But he is not a prophet or superman either. He’s greatly respected by Tibetans, both for his knowledge and also internalized deep understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. But they think of him as very much a human being like everyone else, not some kind of fantasy comic superman.

Yes, they feel there is some kind of a blessing connection with compassion, that’s carried by the line of Dalai Lamas. A connection with compassion that’s not limited in the way that ordinary compassion is, that is without any barriers or limitations or obstacles even. That’s connected to a deep understanding and wisdom, yes, as you say they also think of him as giving a connection to wisdom too, both in this senses of a blessing from his past connections, from previous lives, and also because of his many years of study of the Buddhist teachings, and not just study, also practicing and internalizing them, and the way he has received these blessings too from his many teachers who transmitted the practices of past Tibetan yogis to him.

But by wisdom, Buddhists don’t mean, intellectual knowledge, knowing lots of facts, knowing what the word is for anything in all possible languages, knowing exactly what Opportunity will discover over the next horizon on Mars, knowing the position of every asteroid and every boulder on every planet. It’s more a grounded wisdom, of having your feet strongly on the ground, clay between your toes, and yet with a vastness of understanding too, not shaken by anything. It’s sometimes called omniscience, but it is not the Christian idea of knowing everything. Rather, it’s a case that you are able to respond directly to the most surprising situations, open to anything that might happen, in this grounded yet vast way.

Also this compassion and wisdom is something that Buddhists think we all have a connection with and can find in ourselves, open up to, as something that is vaster than our limited ideas of what we are.

So, he’s thought to have a blessing connection with compassion and wisdom in that sense. But - he is no superman. He is like any of us, is going to die. He is practicing as a Buddhist monk, which is one of many paths in Buddhism. If you ask him if he is enlightened, he will say, no, he isn’t. Even if he is, there’s no reason for him to be a superman.