(Friday morning)

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 "Without going outside his door, one understands all that takes place under the sky; without looking out from his window, one sees the Tao of Heaven. The further that one goes out from himself, the less he knows."

• Tao-Te-Ching, ch. 47

Laotzu 47 was my motto as a researcher. That's why I enjoyed meditation. That's also why I asked for my office to be in the stacks of the main library.

I always admired that white-haired old sage of Divinity Avenue, Achilles Fang. He was the teacher who first took me through Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu in the original. Achilles perpetually hibernated like a turtle in the mud, refusing all temptations to play the game of university politics and strive for higher academic honors. After a few years as an Assistant Professor, I decided my low-key mentor was right and stepped down. I intended never again to be more than an instructor. The burrow of Achilles was deep in the basement of the Harvard-Yenching Library, hidden behind the floor-to-ceiling rows of blue cloth boxes latched with ivory slips and titled in ancient characters with white ink. These boxes formed the greatest collection of block-printed Chinese books in the world. Whenever Achilles needed any information, he simply shuffled out in his bathrobe and slippers to rummage about among the boxes.

Despite University rules, the old man insisted on smoking his pipe behind the piles of dusty unchecked-out books that decorated his desk.

He often conducted seminars from behind the subterranean desk. True bookman that he was, he would wave in his left hand a chuan from a silk-sewn Sung edition, casually folded back on itself and rolled in half, as he reminded me that "Chinese chuan are like comic books. You can get comfortable with them. Not like your stiff Western hardback bindings." Then he would stretch forth his right hand, pipe in hand, stem pointing outward toward the vast expanse of blue cloth housing the huge Taoist Anthology just outside his office door, - and my mind's eye would see an old Chinese fisherman on the banks of a stream. Slowly and deliberately he opined: "You know, Walker, it is madness. If I were you, I wouldn't touch that box with a ten foot bamboo pole." Of course, in my own ornery madness, I immediately made it a priority to dive deeply into whatever waters he pointed his pipe stem toward.

The oriental collection at the University of Iowa is housed in the main library, so that's where I wanted my office. And with perseverance I finally got a small room there on the third floor along a dingy hallway. It wasn't directly in the stacks, but at least it was very undisturbed, and the Oriental section was on that floor. I only had to walk down a hall, through some doors, into the stacks, and down to the far end. The East Asian resources consisted of ten stacks and a tiny periodical room for all of China, Japan, and Korea. That didn't hold a candle to the glorious Yench, but there I was, and it sufficed for the moment. At least the Russian section was admirably stocked.

I unlocked the door and groped for my incandescent lamp on the desk. There was no window, and I detested the buzz and flicker of the florescent lighting that the office came supplied with. Having no window was fine with me. To hell with fresh air! I love the smell of dusty old books. I don't ever want to stare out at trees and clouds when I am in my research hole like I did while bored in grade school. I guess I overreacted. I envied the total windowlessness of the huge ten-story rough marble cube they had built in Bloomington to house the main library of Indiana University. They had probably the best collection of Central Asian books in the world, thanks to the indefatigable collecting of Turkish folklorist, Ilhan Bashgoz.

At any rate I cleared the accumulated academic detritus from my desktop and replaced it with a globe, a large flipchart pad, and a selection of colored pens. I liked to doodle and make lists while I planned a project. On one sheet I started a list, the names of those I would contact who might shed light on the problem.

At the top of the list I put my four best contacts in the oriental martial arts community. Old Master Zhao was my first guru during that long sojourn in Asia and now lived secluded in the mountains of Colorado. The Taoist prodigy, Kang Yong-qing, lived in Montauk, Long Island. The Lightning Kahuna Ninjitsu - Navy Seal and Special Forces Trainer, Brad Yamada, was on the Big Island. And "Taiji" Tuan Tou was the mystery man of Chicago. Funny, I thought to myself as I looked at my list. All four of these world class Oriental wizards are presently here in the United States, not in Asia.

On a second sheet I started another list of places and topics that seemed relevant. Noah had asked me to look into the motives and organization of terrorism in China, but this was also clearly a global phenomenon, and key players were not limited to China alone. I would have to explore the big picture as well.

What first popped into my awareness when I thought of China as an aggressive terrorist nation, was Tibet. Since the invasion of Tibet in the early '50's by the recently triumphant Communist regime, China had systematically destroyed Tibetan culture. Monks were defrocked, temples dynamited, and books were burned - just like during the suppressions of Buddhism that had periodically convulsed China during the turbulent ages of medieval warring kingdoms and even during the glorious Tang dynasty. When the terrors of the Red Guards came to Tibet, what started as a means to merely tear the Chinese people loose from their attachment to traditional lifestyles and possessions became deliberate cultural and racial genocide. The Chinese acted with impunity because hardly anybody even knew anything about Tibet. The strategic value of the remote Himalayan kingdom was simply unappreciated by the rest of the world. Tibet was too inaccessible to bother about - and China successfully counted on this response.

Nevertheless, as a rule, China only expanded to fill borders that she could by a stretch of the imagination justify historically. I could see the fostering of heroin trade as a form of revenge for the embarrassment suffered during the Opium Wars. But China by and large was culturally inward directed, preoccupied with its self-created identity as the great Central Kingdom, and therefore tended to be isolationist at heart. The difficulty of its language and writing system only served to further exaggerate this tendency. Tibet and Taiwan were special cases.

So China was a puzzle to study. But who else was into international terrorism? The Middle East, of course, flashed into my mind. Khomeini's heirs in Iran, Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria, Lebanon, Arafat and the Palestinians (though he seemed to be turning a new leaf), and Khaddafi's Libya. The Mid-East tension seemed to swirl around the apparent antipathy of the Islamic cultures to the emergent Jewish nation of Israel.

And then, until its recent demise, the Soviet Union was a major Communist empire with nuclear weapons. And those weapons were still there. International Communism masterminded by Moscow had always been considered a key player in the balance of international terror. Actually, much of their policy was dictated by internal concerns that were little understood by the West. Now that the empire had dissolved into separate quasi-democratic states, there was a big question mark about the ultimate disposition of all that military might among a welter of dissident groups who had suffered many long years under the heavy rule of Stalin and his successors.

At a quick glance it seemed that most of the International Terrorism phenomenon focussed around the polarity of Muslims vs. Jews and Communists vs. Capitalists and their various petty running dogs.

But the equation didn't add up right. Nobody believed in Communism anymore. Not even the hard-line Communists themselves did. So how come terrorist incidents were on the increase as Communism was on the decrease?

True enough Islamic Fundamentalism was on the rise. But, although the birth of Islam had strong militaristic tendencies, the religion itself did not support the use of terrorism. The name "Islam" is usually rendered "submission," but it comes from salama "he was safe," and ultimately derives from the Semitic root *slm that means "to be whole or complete." The traditional Arabic greeting, "Salaam wo-aleichem" and the Hebrew salutation, "Sholom aleichem," both mean, "Peace be with you." If the ideology of both sides is built around peace, and the Arabs and Jews are even racially and linguistically all Semitic brothers, where is the terrorism coming from that puts them into conflict?

Some energy other than Communism was moving inside China (and Russia.) Communism was just an excuse. Some other dynamic was underneath the apparent polarity of Muslims and Jews. I would have to dig into the origins of the Semitic culture to find the beliefs that were causing such irrational stress.

In a flash of intuition it occurred to me that almost all writing in the world is based on either Chinese characters - called by the Chinese "Han-zi" - or the Hebrew alphabet. The last two vortexes of extreme political stress on the planet seemed to have settled on the sources of these two radically different writing systems. Could this have a connection with International Terrorism? Naaaah. But a faint tickle in my chest moved me to jot down on a sheet from the pad:

HAN-ZI <-?-> ALPHABET.

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