The Art of War (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Jan Willem Honig, Ilmari Käihkö and Sun Tzu

“The art of war is of vital importance to the State,” writes General Sun Tzu at the outset of one of the most important military treatises ever written. Furthermore, he writes, war can lead to safety or ruin and must not be engaged in lightly—it is a matter of life and death. What follows is a terse, sober analysis of the successful planning and conduct of war, which is as pertinent in the twenty-first century as it was in China 2,500 years ago.

Within these pages, Sun Tzu explores:

• The five fundamental facets of war and the seven elements that determine outcomes

• War economy and limiting the cost of conflict

• The importance of unity, discipline, alliances, and cities

• Strategic defense and the recognition of offensive opportunities

• Flexibility in responding to changing circumstances

• Fighting wars without having to do battle

• The five sources of intelligence and how to use them

As notable for its insights into motivating people and knowing one’s opponent as for its emphasis on preparedness, flexibility, and understanding the environment, The Art of War has become an important resource for modern business people, trial lawyers, and sports teams—as well as for military leaders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141025

Book preview

Sun Tzŭ Giving Military Training to Court Ladies, painting by Yasuda Yukihiko.

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Introduction, Annotations, and Further Reading

© 2012 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Suntzu Giving Military Training to Court Ladies, painting by Yasuda Yukihiko from Modern Japanese art in original colors, Volume 2 by Kobayashi Tadashi, published by Shogakukan.

Chinese Records on Bamboo Strips. Courtesy of Roger T. Ames from Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare; Ballantine Books/Random House, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-4351-3650-2 (print format)

ISBN 978-1-4351-4102-5 (ebook)

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CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SUN TZŬ

INTRODUCTION

THE ART OF WAR (WITHOUT COMMENTARY)

THE ART OF WAR (WITH COMMENTARY)

EXAMPLES OF MODERN TRANSLATIONS

ENDNOTES

BASED ON THE BOOK

FURTHER READING

EDITOR’S NOTE: We present Sun Tzŭ’s The Art of War in two formats—Lionel Giles’ classic translation without commentary, followed by the same translation with Giles’ interpolated explanatory commentary.

ILLUSTRATIONS

SUN TZŬ GIVING MILITARY TRAINING TO COURT LADIES

(Frontispiece)

This modern Japanese painting by Yasuda Yukihiko (1884–1978) depicts the famous scene of Sun Tzŭ training King Ho Lu’s concubines. Sword drawn, Master Sun is about to focus the minds of the inattentive ladies on the task at hand and announce the execution of the king’s two favourite concubines for failing to effectively transmit his orders and impose discipline. Probably an apocryphal story, it has been a staple of Sun Tzŭ lore since Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien (Sima Qian), the great Chinese historian, penned it down in the first century BCE.

(Credit: Painting by Yasuda Yukihiko from Modern Japanese Art in Original Colors, Volume 2 by Kobayashi Tadashi, published by Shogakukan)

CHINESE RECORDS ON BAMBOO STRIPS

(Page 48)

A set of restored wooden strips containing text from Sun Tzŭ’s Art of War, from one of the tombs discovered at Lin-i in China in 1972. This find confirmed that Sun Tzŭ’s text existed in thirteen chapters by the second century BCE.

(Credit: Courtesy of Roger T. Ames from Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare, Ballantine Books/Random House, Inc.)

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SUN TZŬ

INTRODUCTION

GIVEN THE CENTRAL ROLE WAR HAS PLAYED IN HISTORY, IT MAY surprise that so few books on the conduct of war have achieved the status of classic. Even more astonishingly, one of the classic texts may well be the oldest known book on the subject. Widely believed to have been written 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzŭ’s The Art of War continues to instruct generals across the world in the ways of winning wars. And its usefulness is not limited to military leaders: businessmen scour Sun Tzŭ for methods of managing their companies and defeating their competitors. Some editions even claim that reading the ancient Chinese master can help suitors win over the opposite sex and assist sports coaches in putting their teams on the road to victory.

How is it that this work has withstood the test of time so successfully and conquered the worlds of war, business, sports, and love? The quality of the message is, of course, one reason. But, as this introduction will explore, there are others. The uncertainties regarding authorship, the long gestation history of the text, the style of writing, and luck have all played equally important parts. In combination, these factors have allowed many generations of Chinese and Japanese, and much more recently, thanks to translation, the rest of the world, to construct their Sun Tzŭ.

According to tradition, Sun Tzŭ (Sunzi), or Master Sun—whose full name was Sun Wu—served as a general under Ho Lu (Helü), the king of Wu, who reigned from 514 to 496 BCE.¹ Details of his life are scanty. For all his later renown, Sun Tzŭ does not appear in any contemporary records. The first story about his life dates from some four hundred years later and takes the form of a morality tale. The great historian Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien (Sima Qian) (ca. 145 or 135 BCE–86 BCE) relates how King Ho Lu desired to test the author of the thirteen chapters on the art of war by having him train 180 ladies of the palace for war. Sun Tzŭ is said to have divided the group into two and appointed the king’s favorite concubines to command each company. As the reader is meant to expect, the giggling women fail, not once but twice, to take the exercise seriously. Sun Tzŭ thereupon orders the summary execution of the company commanders. Ho Lu naturally objects, but is put in his place by Master Sun’s stern comment that the king is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds. The concubines are executed and, in silence, the surviving women obey their general’s every command. Convinced of his ability, Ho Lu appoints Sun Tzŭ his general and he shared in the might of the King.² The story tells us little, if anything at all, about the personality of Sun Tzŭ. Instead it makes general points about the relative independence of military commanders from royal interference and the importance of iron discipline enforced through selective punishment. The lack of biographical information may well mean that Master Sun was a mythical figure whose reputation has never been in danger of being diminished by the knowledge of unpleasant facts about his life.

Lionel Giles, the noted sinologist responsible for the 1910 translation that forms the basis of this edition, nonetheless had little doubt that Sun Tzŭ was a real historical person and that his work was written between 505 and 473 BCE. Subsequent scholarship has been more doubtful. It is quite possible that the thirteen chapters ascribed to Sun Tzŭ are actually a condensation of a number of writings that emerged over the centuries following Ho Lu’s reign at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period (770–481 BCE) and to which the name of a single author was attached later. Scattered pieces of internal evidence, joined with a better recent understanding of developments in ancient Chinese warfare, indicate that the work’s constituent parts probably date from a period in Chinese history known as the Warring States (481–221 BCE). Only a matter of decades ago, further supporting evidence emerged from a quite sensational archaeological discovery. In 1972, a tomb dating from the late second century BCE was opened up at Lin-i in Shantung Province in China. It contained a whole series of military manuscripts, including parts of each of the thirteen chapters that now make up Sun Tzŭ’s The Art of War. The tomb did not conclusively settle the issue of authorship nor establish firmly the precise scope of Sun Tzŭ’s writings. Master Sun is mentioned in some, but not all, fragments. Even more excitingly, and confusingly, his name also appears in fragments that were either unknown or not hitherto associated with him. The archaeological finds thus seem to indicate that writings credited to Sun Tzŭ formed over time and slowly coalesced around thirteen chapters.

In fact, the text within the chapters remained remarkably open to change throughout its long history. This malleability was due to the ways in which the text was physically transmitted and intellectually handled. The ancient Chinese wrote single lines of vertical text on strips of bamboo or wood. These strips, usually some ten inches long and a third of an inch wide, were tied together, and rolled up in a bundle, they made a book. This kind of binding made them prone to breaking and scattering into single strips. In the tombs at Lin-i, archaeologists dug up a dirty, muddy jumble of 4,942 individual bamboo strips, which took literary scholars years to transcribe, organize, and publish. Interested readers can find a reconstruction of the Lin-i Sun Tzŭ in English by Roger Ames—who, with D. C. Lau, recovered and translated another, hitherto completely lost work also entitled The Art of War by Sun Pin (Sun Bin), an author traditionally believed to be a descendant of Sun Tzŭ (see Further Reading). The work of modern scholars, like Ames and Lau, does not differ fundamentally from the practices of two millennia of Chinese scholars. Nowadays, we are perhaps more interested in establishing the original, authentic text and are able to disseminate it through authoritative printed editions with respectable publishers, but the editorial process continues to require decisions regarding the question of what constitutes the text. Editors of the past perhaps had more opportunities for introducing mistakes, as well as deliberate emendations and additions. For one thing, before the invention of printing, they needed to create each new copy by laboriously copying another by hand. Retying the strips of a book that had fallen apart could result in some parts being left out and forgotten, while here and there, new sections might be unobtrusively added. The vulnerability of the medium and its reproduction process thus allowed for a text over time to become removed from its original form.

Chinese stylistic conventions added further opportunities for change. In line with the aphoristic nature of early Chinese writing, each strip tended to contain one or, at most, a couple of complete thoughts. This literary style tended not to value the systematic development of an argument across a number of strips. Since phrases and sections were also not numbered, trying to group thoughts under a general heading was no easy task for those who sought to put a broken book back together or transmit a corrupted copy. Even compilers and copyists who were trying to be faithful to the original faced a constant temptation to rearrange text, cut sections, and add interpolations to connect or explain passages that might seem unrelated or obscure. As was the case with the already established use of more perishable silk for writing, the invention of paper in China in the second century ce did not change this. Perhaps because more text could now be seen on a page, it actually stimulated an editorial propensity for tinkering. It also made it much easier for comments by learned scholars to be added to the text. From this time onward, we see the emergence of a distinguished group of commentators, starting with one of China’s greatest generals, Ts’ao Ts’ao (Cao Cao; 155–220 CE).

The later invention of book printing, by using wood blocks, marked an important next stage by allowing for a particular text version to become more fixed. It also meant that far more copies of a work could be produced, and so it would likely find wider dissemination. Thus, a key date for the Sun Tzŭ, as the scholars in the field tend to say, was the publication of the first printed edition around the year 1200 CE during the emperor Ning-tsung’s reign. This was based on a text that had been established by imperial edict more than a century earlier, when the Sun dynasty emperor Shen Tsung (reigned 1067–1085) had made the Seven Military Classics obligatory reading for those who wanted to obtain a commission in the army.³ Printed editions also could easily accommodate the extensive commentaries which, as said, Sun Tzŭ had already been attracting since the second century CE. They could be interspersed with the short phrases of Sun Tzŭ’s main text using a clearly recognizable, different size typeface. With time, however, copies of the Sung edition vanished, while other textual traditions survived and developed. By the late eighteenth century, the imperial government once again saw fit to try to establish order. Another official government edition was produced, this one by the antiquarian and classical scholar Sun Hsing-yen (1752–1818). This version became the standard text used by all modern English editions including Giles’ until the discovery, in 1972, of the much earlier fragments that had been frozen in time in the tomb at Lin-i.

One can see the effects of this long, disorderly adaptive historical process in the modern translations of Sun Tzŭ. In this edition, Giles sometimes notes when a sentence or a numbered paragraph appears out of place. When one puts Giles’ Sun Tzŭ next to other modern English editions, one will see that occasionally translators have decided to omit certain sections they judge overly obscure or out of place. A comparison also reveals that the text within the thirteen chapters is often divided and numbered differently. And, of course, passages are translated very differently (see the section with examples from various modern translations on page 237). An English reader can thus acquire an immediate sense of the tortuous transmission of the text and the range of possible interpretations by comparing various translations. Such a comparison also offers a glimpse of the great challenge modern Chinese speakers face when they attempt to decipher the classical Chinese of more than two thousand years—even the characters and concepts that can still be recognized have often shifted in meaning.

Yet, far from being a weakness, the editorial engagement and flexible readings of the text have led to a constant process of regeneration that can be said to have kept the Sun Tzŭ alive for more than two millennia. Integral to this process was the Chinese practice of commenting on the classics. Like the variations in the text, the commentaries suggested different ways of understanding and interpreting the text and gave its meaning a flexibility that enabled it to adapt to changing times. The Sun Tzŭ was fortunate in its commentators. Ts’ao Ts’ao was joined over time by others, including the celebrated poet Tu Mu (Du Mu; 803–852 CE). By the time the