I had a tougher time locating his church than I expected. I found what I thought was the right backstreet and corner but with the wrong building; that, or the defunct woolen mill which had always seemed so suited to the shaggy flock that my friend shepherded had been completely changed. Instead of a drab cement block there was a cute little church fronted with bright red brick. Wire-mesh factory windows had been replaced with beautiful stained glass, and where a grimy smokestack once angled up from the roof there was now a copper-spired steeple shining in the morning sun. I wasn't sure it was the same place at all until I walked around back: the tin-roofed garage that served as the minister's rectory was the same ratty rundown trash pile from five years ago.

The vine-framed door was ajar and I went in. When my tired eyes adjusted to the messy gray gloom I saw the man sound asleep and completely naked on a raised waterbed. The huge plastic bladder was as much a mess as the rest of the room, a Sargasso Sea of clutter, with my friend floating peacefully amid the rest of the flotsam. I gave a bare patch of the gray plastic a slap that sent a shimmying swell coast to coast. I saw consciousness slowly rising to the surface of the bearded face. Finally he raised up on a wobbly elbow, causing books and bottles and beer cans and pizza boxes and tarot cards to undulate around him while he squinted at my face. His hard night had left his eyes redder than my long haul had mine. At length he grunted hello, then flopped right back down and drew a turtleneck sweater sleeve across his brow. I pulled up the nearest orange crate and set down to fill him in on all the Oregon gossip. None of my news got more than an occasional grunt out of him, not until I mentioned the reason I happened to be passing through. This heaved him sitting full up like a seismic wave. "You're going where to cover what?"

"To Peking. To cover the Chinese Invitational Marathon."

"To Beijing China? Why Godalmighty, mate, you can find out what has become of Fung Yu-lan!"

"Who?"

"Dr. Fung Yu-lan!" the minister cried. "Master Fung Yu-lan! Merely one of the most influential philosophers in the modern mother world! Or was…"

He waited a moment for that shock wave to subside, then began Australian crawling his way toward the shoreline.

"I'm not exaggerating. Twenty-five years or so ago Fung was considered the brightest star in the East's philosophical firmament, a beacon for panphenomenalistic voyagers for fifty years! Then, one day, suddenly – foof! nothing. Not the dimmest glimmer. All trace of him blotted out, buried beneath that black cloud known as the Cultural Revolution."

I told him that it was supposed to be my primary task to cover a live race, not uncover some buried fossil. "At least this is the opinion of the shoe manufacturers who own the sports mag that's sending me to China. I better stick to their schedule. They are footing the bill, so to speak."

"That doesn't mean you have to toe their line every step of the way, does it?" he demanded. "You can work it into your story. A little extracurricular shouldn't give them any gripe. If it does, tell the capitalistic shoemongers to go bite their tongues. Tell them to look to their soles. Tracking down Fung is more important than some bourgeois bunion derby. And this isn't just any old fossil, this is a rare old fossil! He, he's a – wait! I'll show you what he is."

The minister released my hand and stepped back up into his waterbed. He waded through the swell to the bedside wall of orange crates he had nailed up for shelves and bookcases. He began pawing among the books, hundreds of books, checking titles, tossing them aside, all the while keeping up a running rap over his shoulder as he searched.

"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.