If all I have to do to /reach enlightenment/attain nirvana/understand the nature of God/ is to read a few sentences, why not readily give them to everyone?
Well, technically because it’d be meaningless. The typical analogy is with telling a born-blind person that “seeing the color red is like feeling warmth, and seeing the color blue is like feeling cold”. They grasp the words, they get the analogy, they build some very, very fuzzy mental model of what you might be talking about, but they definitely didn’t see anything red or blue (or anything at all) by having merely heard the sentence.
The assumption, then, is that at least some people (not all) have the possibility of developing, through careful, directed practice, the ability to perceive things beyond the ordinary senses. Not out of nowhere, but because the potential is already there, it just needs work. Once they do, they’ll also notice the “something” that was given that weird name, “red”, by those who noticed it before. And now that they too have the “knowledge” of what “red” is, they can begin talking with other “red-perceivers” about mindbogglingly esoteric unintelligible things such as “shades of red”, “pigments”, “the color wheel”, “the RGB standard”, “visible colors that don’t exist in the electromagnetic spectrum” etc., whatever those might be, and refining them further.
So, it isn’t that you cannot have access to the sentences. In fact, you can find plenty of very detailed descriptions of what “Emptiness”, “Nirvana”, “Buddha Nature” and the like are. But they are all, for those without the actual “knowledge” (perception) of them, just so many variations of “red is warm”.
Well, technically because it’d be meaningless. The typical analogy is with telling a born-blind person that “seeing the color red is like feeling warmth, and seeing the color blue is like feeling cold”. They grasp the words, they get the analogy, they build some very, very fuzzy mental model of what you might be talking about, but they definitely didn’t see anything red or blue (or anything at all) by having merely heard the sentence.
The assumption, then, is that at least some people (not all) have the possibility of developing, through careful, directed practice, the ability to perceive things beyond the ordinary senses. Not out of nowhere, but because the potential is already there, it just needs work. Once they do, they’ll also notice the “something” that was given that weird name, “red”, by those who noticed it before. And now that they too have the “knowledge” of what “red” is, they can begin talking with other “red-perceivers” about mindbogglingly esoteric unintelligible things such as “shades of red”, “pigments”, “the color wheel”, “the RGB standard”, “visible colors that don’t exist in the electromagnetic spectrum” etc., whatever those might be, and refining them further.
So, it isn’t that you cannot have access to the sentences. In fact, you can find plenty of very detailed descriptions of what “Emptiness”, “Nirvana”, “Buddha Nature” and the like are. But they are all, for those without the actual “knowledge” (perception) of them, just so many variations of “red is warm”.