I might be fighting a strawman here, since the above was written almost twenty years ago. But I have certainly seen this attitude before: academic study of philosophy is either non-productive or even counterproductive, and learning philosophical terms will just cloud your mind from the pure light of the truth. This is something that people believe about Buddhist doctrine, and they believe it even more about "Western philosophy", which usually starts from the position of an isolated, intellectual ego making judgments about the world, rather than an active, experiencing part of the world.
This is compounded by the fact that most Western philosophers, to one degree or another, believed in power structures, or hierarchies, that now seem odious to us. Why should someone ensconce themselves with a series of dead white men who had painted themselves into a corner with dense terminology that reduced human experience to tricky epistemological (and there is one of those dense terminologies right there!) questions, when they could just take a bunch of LSD, wander into the woods, and have enlightenment come down as a sudden, monolithic revelation? Or for those who like self-discipline, can it be that someone who checks out a book from a library, and reads it at home while comfortably eating a rich dinner and listening to music, can get the same enlightenment as someone who is meditating in an isolated monastery, eating a bare diet, and working constantly?
Yep, it is possible.
A few months ago, for interesting but non-relevant reasons, I started reading The Critique of Pure Reason. I had studied "Western Philosophy" before, and was pretty familiar with its concepts. I had even read The Critique of Pure Reason before. I thought this was old hat, but wanted to review it. What I found instead was that this seemingly dry technical reading made me start asking basic questions about myself and the world, questions that I thought I had superseded either through life experience or more mystical philosophies. And I do agree, the writing is dense, technical, and sometimes seems to talk about things that aren't relevant to our most important concerns. But when I took the time to understand the language, the questions started to get very relevant. It might seem like a pointless question to ask whether the self is a "unity of apperception" or a "simple substance", but for the reader who takes that question seriously, Kant is asking whether the self is a capacity or an entity-- a question that, if you devote yourself to it, will give you some insight. Kant also talks about how, while we know that substances (including, perhaps, ourselves), have conditions, and while we can imagine those conditions removed, it is impossible to make statements about an unconditioned substance. Or, put in other terms, while I might know that I am angry, sad, hungry or happy, and I know that I exist without those particular conditions... but can I imagine myself as totally conditionless?
All of these questions, as I read through them, were not intellectual exercises or word games. They were questions that made me wrestle with how I thought about the world, and that brought insight to me. Perhaps not perfect insight, but the process of reading what is considered conventional Western philosophy has, and still is, expanding my understanding.
So if you think that reading things won't help you reach enlightenment--- I would suggest trying it first, and seeing what happens.