Ghost in the Wire

From Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu:

The Great Teaching is basically quite ordinairy. It is easy to enter for those with sharp facilities and quick wits and broad penetration who don't use their intellectual brilliance to try to comprehend it.

Next, from Suzuki Roshi's Not Always So:

Intellectual understanding is necessary, but it will not complete your study. This does not mean to ignore intellectual understanding, or that enlightenment is entirely different from intellectual understanding. The true, direct experience of things can be intellectualized, and this conceptual explanation may help you have direct experience. Both intellectual understanding and direct experiece are necessary, but it is important to know the difference.

Finally, from Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace:

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to trasncend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth. The technique is to release. The Buddhist way of understanding is always letting go of our views and knowledge in order to transcend.