Finding Zero

by Amir D. Aczel

  Reality goes beyond notions of being and nonbeing

  True emptiness is called “wondrous being,” because it goes beyond existence and nonexistence

  The concentration on Emptiness is a way of staying in touch with life as it is, but it has to be practiced and not just talked about.6

  As I concentrated on these notions, I came to believe that I could even read the quoted verses above as saying: existence = 1, nonexistence = –1, and emptiness = 0. Emptiness was the door from nonexistence to existence, in the same way that zero was the conduit from positive to negative numbers, one set being a perfect geometrical reflection of the other along the number line.

  But I now had to find the lost Eastern zero—if indeed it still existed. I knew that in 1931, George Cœdès was able to destroy Kaye’s argument in his seminal paper that employed this zero.7 In fact, Cœdès presented in his paper two newly discovered zeros: One from Palembang, Indonesia, dated to 684 CE, and the one-year-older inscription from the Khmer temple at Sambor on the Mekong. In the paper, the Sambor find was identified as inscription K-127. This K- notation, instituted by Cœdès, would become my main lead in searching for the artifact.

  The importance of K-127, and of the Palembang inscription, is due to the fact that both zeros predate any Arab empire in the Middle East, hence obviating the possibility of a likely knowledge transfer through Arab trade with Europe; since no European zero is earlier than these two finds, the argument about whether the West or the East invented the zero was settled. In addition, the locations of the two early zero finds were farther east than India, and this made it even more unlikely that the zero had come from Europe or Arabia. For if it somehow did, why were there no earlier zero finds in India but two zeros—both two centuries older than Gwalior’s—found thousands of miles farther east? I had to find the lost K-127.

  But the whereabouts of the actual artifact were unknown. Cœdès’s paper included a pencil-rubbing bearing the Khmer numerals 605, where the zero is presented as a dot, but no known photograph of the find was known. In fact, since the resurgence of Khmer Rouge violence in 1990 resulted in the plunder of many more artifacts beyond the original 10,000 they had demolished in the 1970s, scholars in the field had implicitly assumed that K-127 was lost. Did I have any chance of finding it and bringing back to life this monumental piece of evidence for one of humanity’s most ingenious inventions?

  All I knew was that in the 1930s, the Trapang Prei tablet (K-127) was placed in the National Museum of Cambodia, and not much attention was given to it. In 1975, six years after the death of George Cœdès, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and turned the country’s museums and repositories of archaeological artifacts into junkyards. Much was either completely lost or could not be accounted for. I was headed to Cambodia on a mission to find the lost inscription.

  12

  On my trip from Boston to Cambodia, I stopped in Israel to see my sister. After six years with cancer and no Western treatment, Ilana looked great and said she felt well. This was a real blessing and I was relieved to hear it. It focused my attention again, and from a different angle, on the differences between East and West.

  Western medicine believes that cancer must be fought against aggressively, mainly using toxic chemicals and intense ionizing radiation—both of which kill normal cells as well and weaken the body’s immune system. Eastern logic, with its milder, more holistic approach toward health and illness—not necessarily ruled by hard science and statistics like the West’s—prescribes meditation, herbal medicines, and more naturalistic methods. In the case of my sister, at least, it seemed the Eastern way was working. I thought back to the time when I believed Ilana’s approach was illogical and how it induced me to buy a book on logic to try to understand how she could think so wrongly. Now I concluded that she did have a logic—just not the linear, Western kind. And apparently her logic was winning.

  For an outing one afternoon, Ilana and I went to downtown Haifa to see the port, where over many years our father’s passenger ship docked whenever it returned home. The old customs house, which once stood by a large gate to the harbor, was now gone. “You remember what was here?” she asked. I said that I did and was surprised to see it gone. The new entrance to the port had been moved to a different, less prominent location, and the old customs house razed to the ground.

  We continued down that main street leading to the old harbor gate, through which so many passengers had passed once they had undergone a thorough customs inspection in the old wooden building where it was always unbearably hot and stuffy. Turning a corner, my sister pointed to a large electronics store selling knockoff iPads and iPhones and assorted clones. “In those days, if you remember, they used to sell stereos and transistor radios—the electronics of that time,” she reminisced. Yes, I remembered, I said. “And that’s where he would sell all of his smuggled goods, you know,” she continued. “Who?” I asked her. “Laci,” she said, pronouncing it as only a person of Hungarian origin could.

  “Laci was a smuggler?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Oh, you didn’t know? Why do you think he stuck with our father for so many years? It wasn’t love or devotion, you know: It was all about money.”

  My sister had stayed close to all things nautical even after my father was no longer at sea. She later worked for his old shipping company, Zim Lines. “The captain’s suitcases are never opened,” she said, “out of respect for him—you probably remember that. Well, Laci, as the captain’s steward, was the one to take these suitcases through customs. When our father was alone on the ship, he had a small bag—he had no need for anything larger because his uniforms were always on board, and most of his civilian clothes at home, and he bought very little. But when we were with him, there were several big suitcases, and Laci would usually hide something in our mother’s largest suitcase, take all our luggage through customs, where it always passed through unopened and uninspected, and later remove whatever he had hidden in it in the alley just behind this store, and sell it inside. This went on for years.”

  “Did Mom ever know about it?” I asked, still shocked by this revelation.

  “Well, remember those beautiful Italian Radiomarelli speakers we grew up with? Where do you think they came from?” I had no idea, I said. “Your trusted math tutor Laci miscalculated once: the taxi that always came to take us home up the mountain was there too early one trip, and the suitcases had to be loaded into it. Laci simply had no time left to remove his contraband.”

  “Amazing,” I said. She went on: “Well, he never asked for his speakers back—he couldn’t, of course—and I guess Mom felt it was a just payment for having illegally used her suitcase probably for many years. Dad never listened to those speakers—he didn’t know what was happening right under his nose, but he understood that none of us had ever paid for them. Laci made a lot of money and then returned to Europe. I guess he is there now, somewhere—if he’s still alive.”

  This was a hard piece of news for me to digest. I felt let down. The man I admired so much as a mathematician, someone who had taught me a lot and imparted to me a love of numbers—was in fact a smuggler? I found this revelation hard to believe. But I knew that my sister had to be right, as she always remembered details about our life on the ship with a stunning precision, perhaps reliving on an almost daily basis a childhood I had long left behind. I found it hard to sleep that night before my flight to the East to look for the origin of numbers—a quest I began under the influence of someone I considered a great man. Was Laci really just a smuggler? I asked myself again and again throughout that night.

  Waking up the next morning, I resolved that the new information didn’t change much for me in terms of my lifelong quest. Laci may well have had a dark side. He stayed with our family all those decades because he was able to exploit his position to illegal financial gain. But he was still a great mathematician and mentor to a young boy�
�and for that I was still grateful to him. I was continuing my quest regardless of what Laci may or may not have been. The search for zero was far bigger than him. And it was mine and mine alone now.

  Within hours, I was at Ben-Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, ready to board my flight and continue my odyssey. I tried to put what Ilana had told me the previous day out of my mind and to concentrate on the task ahead.

  13

  After a ten-hour flight, I landed in Bangkok. Twenty-seven years earlier, on our honeymoon, Debra and I came to this city. At the time, the airport was small and the terminal was just a tiny building. I was in for a big surprise: Bangkok now has one of the most modern airports in the world, Suvarnabhumi (pronounced in Thai as Suvanapoum) International Airport. Going through immigration was a high-tech experience with cameras and modern technology.

  I grabbed my suitcase and headed into town by the newly finished fast train that connects the suburbs with the city center. From there, the Sky Train, which hovers 50 feet above Bangkok’s crowded streets, delivered me to the steps of my hotel, the Shangri-La, on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River—the city’s main watery artery, connecting its various parts north to south.

  In the morning, I left the hotel by foot and walked north along the bank of the river. Peddlers hawking street food made progress difficult, and the smells of grilled meats, dried fish, frying onions, garlic, and various spices were inescapable. Every Thai person on these busy streets seemed eager to sell me something: if not food, then a fake Rolex or a pornographic DVD.

  Within a couple of blocks, the street life became quieter, and the only sounds I heard were of an occasional tuk-tuk passing by, its driver slowing down to ask me, “Where do you want to go, sir?” But I shook my head, indicating I preferred to walk. I turned a corner into an alley and soon found myself in the midst of the former French colonial center of the city, which still includes the French embassy housed in one of the historic buildings from the 1920s, the tricolor proudly flying above the Chao Phraya.

  A neighborhood of a couple of city blocks’ radius around the embassy comprised the colonial section of the city, which has not changed architecturally from how it appeared in the early twentieth century, when George Cœdès walked these very streets to his office in this quarter.

  He had close links with the Thai aristocracy, developed through his work on cultural affairs and through personal friendships, which enabled his important archaeological work in the region. It didn’t hurt that the crown prince of Thailand was one of his closest friends, and that he had married a Cambodian princess. For a time, Cœdès directed the Thai National Library and was on the boards of a number of cultural and scholarly organizations. He had access to all the archaeological artifacts discovered anywhere in the wide geographical area of Indochina.

  In his lifetime, he translated several thousand steles and inscriptions of all sorts from Old Khmer and Sanskrit. Cœdès was the undisputed world expert on Southeast Asia and its history and archaeology, and his word, often spoken quietly, was authoritative. This would help him change the history of numbers.

  Behind the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok’s oldest and most celebrated hotel, located on the east bank of the Chao Phraya, I saw what I had come here to find: an intact French colonial building with gray wooden balconies and shutters of the kind one often sees in the French Caribbean today. This building once housed Cœdès’s office, and I walked in. The internal staircase, with black wrought-iron railings, was surely original.

  Where there were once offices, this old building now housed mostly small galleries and art dealerships. They displayed alabaster Buddha statues from Myanmar, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century white opaque likenesses of Siddhartha returning to earth from his heavenly voyage, hence the smile one uniformly sees on these particular sculptures that are sometimes robbed from Burmese temples; sandstone heads from Cambodia, purported to be authentic Angkorian statues of Vishnu or Shiva or the great king Jayavarman VII (these statues, if authentic, had to have been smuggled out of Cambodia, or else brought out before the passing of the law forbidding their exportation in the 1970s); and many wooden, bronze, or gilded Buddha statues from Thailand and Laos.

  In what looked like one of the best art dealerships in this complex, the Galerie Mouhot, I met its owner, a Belgian man named Eric Dieu. He was dressed in red slacks and an orange open-collar shirt and sported a large gold watch, which I recognized as belonging to one of the most expensive Swiss brands, a fact he seemed delighted I had noticed. He was clearly very successful but proved to be extremely knowledgeable as well. Whenever I asked him something about an item on display, he would pull out some old art book and explain the history of it from the official information in these art guides. He sold mostly to dealers and museums, he said, and was clearly talking to me for the pleasure of sharing his passion for the region’s antiquities, not because he thought he could sell me anything. I was curious about how a professional dealer might respond to my search.

  I had a problem, I told him, which I came to Southeast Asia to solve. “I am looking for a very important pre-Angkorian inscription, on which the entire history of numbers hinges,” I explained. “It was found in the late nineteenth century at the site of Sambor on the Mekong.”

  Mr. Dieu turned back to his well-stacked bookshelf behind rows of statues and small artifacts. He searched for a moment and then pulled out a large guide to the seventh-century Sambor art style. He leafed through quickly and found a number of inscriptions dating from that period, although not the object of my search. He then sat down and thought for a moment and, looking at the book again, found the name of the art curator of the museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia. He wrote the name down for me: Mr. Chamroeun Chhan. “I would start my search here,” he said. “This man should know something about your lost inscription K-127.”

  This was a good place to start. As I left the building and returned to the Shangri-La Hotel, I made a mental note to search the Internet for the electronic or postal address of the curator of this museum in Cambodia; it included in its collections several inscriptions that were similar to, and of about the same age as, Cœdès’s missing stele K-127. Equally, I thought that it would be useful to search for any information on Cœdès himself: perhaps old letters or notes, which might contain hints about the inscription. The next day, I visited the French embassy for this purpose. Its officials were very courteous but could offer no helpful information.

  I searched everywhere in Bangkok—nothing. An Internet search for the curator of the Siem Reap museum did reveal an e-mail address, however, and I sent Mr. Chamroeun a note asking for his help. But I was frustrated that I could find nothing more related to George Cœdès.

  14

  But I knew that Cœdès did not live only in vibrant, exciting Bangkok, working in the charming building I had just visited. He spent his time in the field looking for inscriptions to translate and study: in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as in the Thai countryside and in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, where he lived with his wife, the niece of the king of Cambodia. And for many years he did some of his best work while stationed in a city far to the north, Hanoi. Here he headed the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the French cultural research organization of Southeast Asia. So after a few more days in Bangkok, I took a night flight to Hanoi.

  I arrived at Hanoi airport around midnight and waited in line for more than an hour for a visa to enter this land. Vietnam is still a Communist country. The unsmiling immigration officers, sitting under a large picture of the hammer and sickle, reminded me of this fact. And the room’s harsh lights made me think of KGB interrogation rooms I’d seen in old movies.

  Leaving the terminal, my passport finally stamped with a Vietnamese visa, I took a taxi and began an hour-long drive on a barely paved road in a darkness so complete that I had no idea what terrain I was passing. I normally travel easily and rarely have fear of un
known places, but the extreme darkness and eerie quiet made me uneasy. I had no idea where we were headed and had to trust that the driver, who spoke no English or French, was not taking me to an isolated field to rob or kill me. He drove without a word, and after an hour I saw the wide, tall walls of enclosures that must have housed many apartments. We navigated through many empty streets and alleys, barely lit here and there by a few sparse streetlights.

  Finally we arrived at the entrance to a massive structure—the old French opera house in the center of the old city. It was now a French-run hotel. Between high, massive marble columns supporting the roof was the glass door to the lobby. A sleepy attendant opened the taxi’s door and grabbed my bag. I paid the cab driver with relief and walked in.

  This was a curious mix of a Western hotel with modern comforts and an Eastern kind of service. At breakfast—a buffet with Western-style cereal and eggs but also Vietnamese noodle soups with traditional fish cakes—the waiter came to my table and, hearing where I was from, muttered, “Osama bin Laden was good.” I felt similar anti-American sentiments everywhere I went in Vietnam.

  I walked through the old French colonial center of Hanoi, searching for Cœdès’s former office at the EFEO. The building, in the 1860s style, was still there, but no French cultural organization. One of the people I asked gave me the name and address of a French expatriate still living in Vietnam who might possess some of the documents the organization failed to repatriate to France.

  I took a taxi out of town, passing fields where water buffalo grazed and peasants wearing the typical conical straw hats plowed small plots of land. We finally reached a slow-flowing river, and a boat rowed by a strong young woman carried me downstream to a village where the man, Pierre Marcel, lived with his Vietnamese wife. Pierre was middle-aged, stocky, and had a pock-marked face. He was friendly, yet behind the outward French talkativeness there was something guarded. Who was he? What was he doing here in the countryside? I had an uneasy feeling that he might have been connected in some way with the French security services, perhaps keeping an eye on things in a Communist country decades after France had to abandon this erstwhile colony. Or perhaps the previous night’s unsettling taxi ride had made my imagination overactive.