Demon Box

“Sixty-some years ago the youthful scholar Fung observed that all of his philosophical peers seemed to be either stubbornly stuck in the Eastern camp or obstinately in the Western. The twain of which are never to meet, right? The Transcendental versus the Existential? The bodhisatva digging his belly button under the bo tree as opposed to the bolshevik building bombs in his basement? These opposing camps have been at each other for centuries, like two hardheaded old stags with horns locked, draining each other’s energy toward an eventual, and mutual, starvation. Our hero decided that this was not his cup of orange pekoe. Or oolong, either. Yet what other alternatives were being served? It was either go West, young Fung, or go East. Then, one bright day, he caught a fleeting flash of a third possibility, a radically new possibility, perhaps, for the mental mariner to try. Radical enough that even back then Fung knew better than to go blabbing it around established academia, East or West. He would continue to honor those two classic ways of thought, but he resolved that he would never join either camp. Instead, he would dedicate himself to what I term ‘The Way of the Bridge.’ He would construct an empirical concept that would span those opposite shores of outlook! Some complicated job of construction, right? This dude was Frank Lloyd Wright, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Marco Polo all in one—get the picture?”

Not very well but I nodded, always impressed by the extent of my friend’s rambling expertise.

“From that day on he has labored at this colossal bridgework. And get this: Fung’s family name means ‘power to cross a wild stream’—a mythical river of the barbarian tribes of Manchu, to be precise—and his given names mean ‘elite friend.’ So this bridge-builder’s complete monicker means ‘Stream-crossing Elite Friend.’ Get it? He lived up to the name, too. For nearly half a century this stream-crosser traveled around our globe, lecturing and publishing and teaching. And learning. In the late thirties he guest-chaired a year at Harvard without pay, claiming all he wanted was the chance to learn about our modern Yankee music. The only reward he took back to China was a footlocker full of swing band seventy-eights his students gave him. Ah! Here he is…”

He had found the volume he was seeking. He waded out of the waterbed’s welter, blowing dust from a black leather cover. Back on the floor he opened the book and bent over a random page in reverent silence for a few moments, as oblivious of the ludicrous picture he presented as one of those nude bronze statues of Rodin’s. Then he closed the book with a sigh and raised his eyes to mine.

“It is so goddamn important to me, old buddy, to enlist you wholeheartedly in this cause, that I am going to break one of my most cardinal rules—I am going to loan a hardbound.”

He let his fingers trail across the worn cover a final time, then handed me the book. I carried it to the orange crate nearest a dirty window so I could make out what was left of the gold letters on the spine: The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Inside the musty cover I read that the work had been translated by E. R. Hughes of Oxford University and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., of London, England, in 1947. The front flyleaf had an embossing that said the book was the Property of the University of California Library Rare Book Room and the date slip at the back indicated it was nearly sixteen years overdue. While I leafed through the yellowing pages, my friend searched the room for his scattered clothes, talking all the while.

“You’re holding volume three of his four-volume History of Chinese Philosophy, a work that is still considered out there in the forefront of the field. Way out. Revolutionary. Because instead of couching the prose in the customary Mandarin idiom of the elite, Fung wrote in common street vernacular, thereby availing the loftiest thinking in China’s incredibly long history of cerebral pursuit to the common coolie! An impertinence that continually had him in Dutch with the Manchu feudalist powers-that-were. But, with what must have been some pretty foxy footwork, Fung was able to keep a step ahead of the ax and maintain his position at the university, and to keep on writing his opus.