While Great Master Yakusan Kōdō is sitting, a monk asks him, “What are you thinking in the still-still state?” The master says, “Thinking the concrete state of not thinking.” The monk says, “How can the state of not thinking be thought?” The master says, “It is non-thinking.”
Experiencing the state in which the words of the great master are like this, we should learn in practice “mountain-still sitting,” and we should receive the authentic transmission of “mountain-still sitting”: this is the investigation of “mountain-still sitting” that has been transmitted in Bud dhism. “Thinking in the still-still state” is not of only one kind, but Yakusan’s words are one example of it. Those words are “Thinking the concrete state of not thinking.” They include “thinking” as skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, and “not thinking” as skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. The monk says, “How can the state of not thinking be thought?” Truly, although “the state of not think ing” is ancient, still it is “How can it be thought about!” “In the still-still state” how could it be impossible for “thinking” to exist? And why do [people] not understand the ascendancy of “the still-still state”? If they were not the stupid people of vulgar recent times, they might possess the power, and might possess the thinking, to ask about “the still-still state.” The great master says, “It is non-thinking.” This use of “non-thinking” is brilliant; at the same time, whenever we “think the state of not thinking,” we are inevitably using “non-thinking.”
In “non-thinking” there is someone, and [that] someone is main taining and relying upon me. “The still-still state,” although it is I, is not only “thinking”: it is holding up the head of “the still-still state.” Even though “the stillstill state” is “the still-still state,” how can “the still-still state” think “the stillstill state”? So “the still-still state” is beyond the intellectual capacity of Buddha, beyond the intellectual capacity of the Dharma, beyond the intellectual capacity of the state of realization, and beyond the intellectual capacity of understanding itself.
http://www.bdkamerica.org/digital/dB...enzo2_2008.pdf