If enlightenment is such a thing, why aren't Buddhist monks and other enlightened types super geniuses at whatever it is they put their minds to, besides making mandalas and such?

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There are two components to spiritual growth. High ‘perceptive responsiveness’ and surrender. They are often conflated, but are not the same thing.

Perceptive responsiveness concerns how mind ‘grabs on’ to things. Surrender refers to how well mind lets go of things. It’s relatively easy to train a mind to grab onto things, every university on the planet has the aim at producing people who can grab.

What’s difficult is letting go. Monks and other meditation practitioners work very hard on relaxing their mind’s tendency to hold onto concepts and make meaning from them. One way of doing this is one-pointed focus on something artistic, like say a mandala. As an exercise, you turn off the meaning-making part of your brain and focus every bit of your mental energy on the task at hand.

Genius is a weird and funny thing. It refers not just to a person’s ability to understand and drive results within a field, but also to how other people perceive said ability. The question’s desire to move away from “making mandalas and such” illustrates this.

But what drives recognition is not the same thing as that which drives understanding. There are many brilliant physicians you haven’t heard about because they haven’t achieved the same status that made Einstein a household name.

The reality is, the human mind is an amazingly capable and wonderful thing. It’s the very thing that seekers of enlightenment try to fight that keeps us from being aware of it. It isn’t that the potential for genius isn’t there. It’s that the mind can’t let go of its obsession with the status, and where the status is confused with genius, that leads people to believe it’s rare. Genius is not rare. Status is. There can only be so many household names.