It has been said that it is unusual for original texts on philosophy to remain as the primary source for learning about their ideas. This, as far as I can tell, does not happen in other fields except in rare cases - one learns about geometry not from euclids elements, but from a textbook which has adapted and polished them into a more easily digestible form. A plausible reason for this is that writings on philosophy often include a mix of structured analysis and nonsensical woo, and it can be hard to extricate the structured ideas from the rest without getting something wrong. A student reading a modern retelling of a classical text would be unable to avoid the anxiety that a key component of the original has been left out or misinterpreted. This, along with wanting to signal that they possess the prowess needed to interpret the text independently,
Apart from its reasons for being, this reliance on the obscure originals has an odd positive effect, as it gives time for ideas to steep in ones mind. While the less-analytic ideas of such texts lack the falsifiability and composability needed to build higher
http://www.davidchess.com/words/BrokenKoans.html#what
One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”
“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”
And the student was enlightened.
Remaining in the mindset of confusion for longer also helps to avoid falling into the trap of falsely believing that you understand something, leaving it as an unknown unknown, a landmine in your world model.