intellectualism or anti-intellectualism and Buddhism From my perspective, the Buddha's Teaching is reductive and subtractive. It's experiential and fundamental for knowing how to die well. It's good for transcending the ego by dissolving into all to find freedom from suffering.

The object is not to gain anything. Intellectual knowledge can help but little intellect is required. Sometimes intellect  can get in the way. 

One can start a practice by just practicing.

Nobody want's to avoid the labor of hard thought because the practice isn't to think, it's to experience. It's Satipatthana. It's understanding the difference between words or other concepts and experiential reality.

Does the Buddha's teaching require much intellect? What is anti-intellectualism in Buddhism?
I don't think Buddhism is inherently anti intellectual. Theravada's Abhidharma, Late Indian / Early Tibetan Mahayana preserved and developed by Gelugpa - are highly intellectual, to name a few.

It's an old adage in Buddhism that Dharma is medicine for the mind, and particular form the teaching takes depends on student's disposition.

There are certainly schools that grew out of concern that some students obsess over concepts and don't see the forest behind the tree. These schools, like many lineages within Tibetan Kham's Kagyu and Nyingma emphasize personal practice and insist on simple no-nonsense pithy instructions passed in private from generation to generation.

Some schools like Ch'an were born as radical response to then increasingly obsessive and speculative intellectualism, true, but Ch'an is far from being the largest or the most influential school. Perhaps the most famous in the West, exactly for its irrational presentations.

The truths that Buddhism teaches are complex and subtle, but in my opinion totally explainable. It's only a matter of time I think until western culture develops enough insight into things Buddhism taps into, and creates an authentically western intellectual representation of them.

We see it already in various forms of literature on topics as diverse as self-help, emotional intelligence, philosophy of mind, bundle theory, hierarchy theory, and others.