 A major turning point in his life came when the Kashmiri scholar Śākyaśrībhadra arrived in Tibet with an entourage of paṇḍitas from India and Nepal. Sapaṇ went to meet him and established a crucial relationship with these scholars. He was able to hire one of the paṇḍitas, Sugataśrī, as a personal tutor for three years, and then return to study with Śākyaśrī for another five years. It was with these scholars that Sapaṇ came to master the linguistic sciences—Sanskrit grammar, poetics, and metrics—but also, and especially, epistemology (tshad ma). Sapaṇ was said to have had various doubts and questions about the understanding of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy that he had received from his early teachers, which were resolved by his studies under Śākyaśrī. He learned to translate under the tutelage of Sugataśrī, and then together with Śākyaśrī retranslated Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika into Tibetan.