In this translation Law is the same as “Dharma,” one of Triple Treasure: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. It includes both teaching and learning, happening at the same time. So when Shakyamuni Buddha realized the truth, he said there were six before him, letting us know that he didn’t begin this realizing of the Dharma, that it was always there and he was just one of those who realized it. The Sixth Patriarch counted himself as the fortieth. Now the number of Patriarchs is eighty or ninety. But when you count, it is actually innumerable, infinite. It is the same when you count your breathing, counting up to three, up to ten. You don’t stick to the number. What is important is what kind of breath you are counting. With teaching, the visible part of teaching and the invisible part of teaching are both teaching. Some people can’t play music, but when they accept and really appreciate music, that is also transmission. When you see these figures, do you just see persons, historically arranged like in a necklace? In this figure, the thread is Dharma. That is a visible way we can imagine how it is. Yet seeing each of these people is also like seeing the shape of a plum blossom. Every year when the time comes they bloom, but just seeing the blossom isn’t enough. When you see Shakyamuni Buddha, number seven, it looks like there is only one figure. So “number seven” is also “number one,” in which all of us are already counted. Or if you are counted as “one hundred,” all those figures disappear within you. Not only those figures, but all generations, everything, disappears within you, and you cannot tell who is first, Shakyamuni Buddha, or you. So to see these many jeweled lives is just in our imagination. For people who don’t know those figures in the background, those efforts of expression, it is the same as empty white paper, nothing. It is the same thing, but how you understand it is different. There is another translation, by Philip B. Yampolsky, of this text. A very kind translation, comparing different Chinese texts. Probably I would have said it was better for us to use if I had it before we started. Reading the translation we are using, I feel many older translations behind it. For instance, the Chinese character for “differentiation” is like a very sharp slope, up or down. The other term when the mind makes no differentiations, is flat. When mind activity goes up, or down, there is a sense of judgement, high and low, good and bad, judging in terms of a goal. The character for “no differentiation” is flat, not only in the human dimension, but in any sense, flatness, completeness. You can’t say which is high and which is low, which is front and which is back.