In Tibet,
new skins are placed in the sun and rubbed with butter to make them softer. The practitioner is like a new skin: hard and rough, with limited vision and conceptual rigidity. Teaching (dharma) is like butter rubbed through practice, and the sun is the direct experience when both apply, the student becomes soft and malleable. But butter stored in bags of skin and when left in place for many years, the skin becomes hard as wood and can not soften again, no matter how new butter is used. Similarly, someone who spent many years studying the teachings, intellectualized and having little direct experience of them, is like the hard skin. Lessons may soften the hardened skin by conditioning and ignorance, but when stored in the intellect and not rub on the individual through practice, and are heated by the sun of direct experience, can become stiff and hard on your intellectual understanding. Then the new teachings not soften, can not enter it, nor change. We must be careful not to keep teaching as intellectual concepts only, and that intellectual understanding itself becomes an impediment for wisdom. The teachings are not to collect ideas, but a way forward.
