The resulting document—for Sun Tzu was a man of the aristocracy and could write—is a treatise that has come down through history to be called Sun-tzu ping-fa, Sun Tzu on the Art of War, just Sun Tzu (the customary nomenclature the Chinese use instead of a book title), or, as in many modern editions, The Art of War. For Sun Tzu, war, like most of mankind’s social, biological, and financial activities, followed certain patterns that can be distilled into laws. He codified his observations into the first military treatise in recorded history. Significantly, he was not only the first to teach that the side that controls those laws of engagement wins, but the long-term influence of his and certain other texts meant that Imperial China, once it had taken shape, rarely needed to wage war outside its boundaries. At the time Lionel Giles made his translation, in fact, China was considered something of a teddy bear among the bellicose hotheads of empire. So Giles in this translation is braiding the two warring streams of thought about war—that it is senseless butchery and that it serves as a sacred restorative to the body politic—into a work that cautions against war, then argues for how it may best be carried out. This is an extraordinary document at an extraordinary turning point in world history.
Equally important, though perhaps startling to Western ears, is the statement that Sun Tzu was a humanist. He adv-cated waging fast, offensive wars, once one had made deliberate calculations and decided that war was the only reasonable alternative. Why? Fewer deaths, less destruction of the countryside, and thus less hardship on the farmers who lived there and worked the land. This was humanism with an edge, however, since farmers and peasants also serve as conduits for information and sources for food and shelter for armies in the field. Moreover—and this has inspired American as well as Asian generals—Sun Tzu taught that the less destruction of the land, people, and infrastructure, the more the victor would gain, and the easier it would be to convert the vanquished into citizens, not rebels.
A digression on the major centers of civilization might be helpful here: At the time Sun Tzu trod the earth, China would have been evolving for nearly two millennia. Europe and Russia were barbarian lands and Mesopotamia was in decline, but Athens was at its ascendance—this is about the time of the Peloponnesian Wars. India was well developed, with a highly organized social structure. Indeed, though it would fix on class issues more than actual combat, by about 300 B.C. what might be called the Indian Art of War, the Artha Sastra, would be composed by Kautilya.
Thanks to the intrepid work of anthropologists and archaeologists, not to mention the Chinese passion for compiling historical records, we know something of the times and the culture of 500 B.C. China already possessed a written language and most of the characteristics that made it one of the most advanced empires on the planet. Well before 1600 B.C., the Chinese had invented and were using metal casting. By Sun Tzu’s time, though they did not work gold, they produced exquisite jade objects, jewelry, unsurpassed ceramics, and huge bronze statues. They had horse-drawn chariots and formidable weapons of war.
The Chinese were not explorers or wanderers. Others, often barbarians, came to them, especially along the fabled Silk Road, but the Chinese did not travel much until historical times. Early on, they founded scores of complex cities, arranged with three well-defined areas situated within or behind retaining walls; these protective walls often figure in Sun Tzu’s calculations. For example, the wall of Chou was made of pounded earth 30 feet high and 40 feet thick. Any general would have to think hard about surmounting that! The typical urban layout, according to historian J. M. Roberts (A Short History of the World), was “a small enclosure where the aristocracy lived, a larger one, inhabited by specialized craftsmen and merchants, and the fields outside which fed the city.” Commerce bustled and mercantile streets included jewelry, food and clothing shops, and “taverns, gambling houses, and brothels.”
Every commentator, however, will point out that for all the wonders of its cities, the heart of Chinese society is in the countryside. The power of the landowners over the peasants as well as the land during the time when Sun Tzu wrote is difficult to imagine for those who have experienced the rootlessness of contemporary society. The aristocracy not only controlled the land much as feudal lords would some 1,000 years later in Europe, but they owned the carts, the livestock, the implements, and even the people. As Roberts points out, adding an important dimension to Sun Tzu’s advice to generals in encouraging troops: “Labourers could be sold, exchanged, or left by will”; in other words, many members of the infantry would have been serfs. Also, in those times the nobleman always had a monopoly on armaments, and “only noblemen could afford the weapons, armour, and horses [of war].”
Highly developed as Chinese culture was, the era of the Spring and Autumn period, during which Sun Tzu composed his treatise, was outstandingly brutal. More than one hundred feudal states and principalities were reduced to about forty, in a process that continued until about 403 B.C., when the state of Ch’in officially split into three parts and there were only seven important states left. The year began the Warring States period, which ended in the unification of the empire under Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, the first emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty, who took power in 221 B.C.
Classical Chinese at the time Sun Tzu wrote was a matter of “pronouncements,” as was also true in early Western and Near Eastern civilizations; consider, for example, the pithy maxims of Marcus Aurelius and Hesiod. And particularly in the case of documents such as Sun Tzu’s military treatise, clans and families in a sense “owned” information—just as in medieval European guilds fathers passed on their goldsmithing or other specialized training and lore to their sons; the transmission of this information was accomplished in both physical and verbal lessons. A written version would have served solely as a mnemonic, and the language was therefore often startling and symbolic, like poetry.
Further, both as an aid to memory and also because of the intrinsic characteristics of the language, which consists of single syllables ending in mutable vowel sounds, there is a tendency in Chinese writing “to use balanced, parallel phrases, and to treat ideas in the form of numerical categories—the five felicities, the three virtues, etc.” (Early Chinese Literature). This gives the language an unparalleled drive and power but, as with poetry, makes it almost impossible to translate while retaining its original efficiency and style. And in a strong divergence from the Western Romantic ideal, the Chinese made no distinction between belles lettres and didactic literature, between philosophy, say, and storytelling or military treatises. The Emperor Wan of Wei even referred to literature as “a vital force in the ordering of the state.”
The distinguishing mark of writing was its refinement or its vulgarity of expression. “Good” meant works of whatever stripe that were “morally sound in content, clear in thought, and expressed in suitably gracious and dignified language” (Early Chinese Literature). Meanwhile readers avidly sought works—this is also characteristic of high culture in Greece and India—that explored what the twentieth-century poet Stephen Spender (in The Making of a Poem) would call “that human experience so neglected in modern art—the art of ruling, the art of being a prince and being responsible for the use of power.”
The moral and social content of the ancient Chinese world was thoroughly scrutinized and reflected upon by Sun Tzu. As a result, his was an approach to human frailty so elastic and capacious—and so true not just to the Chinese, but to the human way—that it sits easily with Western and Eastern military establishments, and still can form the basis for hilarious, long-running Korean sitcoms, kung-fu action flicks, sight gags in Hollywood comedies, countless boost-your-aggression-quotient tomes by business-school professors, and cusp-of-religious-enquiry books. It’s been an endless marvel since its first “publication” some 2,500 years ago.
For writers in the West from Hugo Grotius (De jure belli et pacis, 1625) to President Theodore Roosevelt (The Winning of the West, 1889), wars, like the great forest fires of summer, cleanse society of its Darwi
nian detritus and give backbone to those who survive. John Milton’s Satan distilled it as: “th’ unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield / And what is else not to be overcome?” (Paradise Lost, book 1). If we learn about war from the movies, in which heroes rise from innumerable wounds in seconds flat to fight with nary a shiver of fear, it does seem a clean, albeit loud, exercise, and reading the clipped, clear pronouncements of Sun Tzu would make it seem all the easier. But historically war is synonymous with mud and thorns, with dysentery, typhoid, and famine. The best military minds may disagree on many points, but on one they will always concur: The only way to prevent war is to know how to wage and win it better than your enemy. So, first, let us examine what we think war is, how it is defined, and then proceed to how it is waged.
West or East, Asia or Europe, war conjures deception as much as destruction. The old High German word for war—the root of the English word—was werre, “to confound.” And wars, as opposed to beer-hall brawls, are not a “blind struggle between mobs of people” but rather an engagement or a series of them between well-organized masses, moving as a team, acting under a single, overarching will, and directed against a definite objective: another country or alliance of countries. This definition (adapted from the Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition) is key.
The nineteenth-century Prussian scholar Carl von Clausewitz amplifies that description to give us a precise understanding of tactics versus strategy in his monumental work Vom Kriege (On War):
The conduct of war . . . consists in the planning and conduct of fighting. . . . [Fighting] consists of a greater or lesser number of single acts, each complete in itself, . . . called “engagements.” . . . This gives rise to the completely different activity of planning and executing these engagements themselves, and of coordinating each of them with the others in order to further the object of the war. One has been called tactics, and the other, strategy.
Wars are political. They derive from the will of one polis, or people, against another, usually in a contest to determine which will exercise sovereignty over land, as in territorial wars, or beliefs, as in religious or ideological wars. Either way, war requires a definite objective and a definite enemy. Terrorism is not war; it is an important tactic of war. The distinction is neither arbitrary nor small. To give some recent examples: Terrorism was used with extraordinary efficiency by the Nazis in World War II (a large invading nation against a weaker one), by the would-be Israelis in their quest for statehood from England (a small force against a larger one), and by France as it battled Algerian independence fighters (a large force against a weaker one). The scholar Francis Dummer Fisher, cited by historian Barbara Fields (Humane Letters: Writing in English About Human Affairs, 2003), writes, “War is not defined by damage, however great, but by an intent to conquer.” Professor Fields, an expert on the American Civil War at Columbia University, continues:
Just as mass murder is not necessarily terrorism, so mass murder and terrorism are not necessarily war. Indeed, their perpetrators often choose mass murder and terrorism precisely for lack of the political standing, power, resources, or numbers to wage war. . . . Any attempt to destroy life and property, without an objective of conquest, is a criminal act, and its perpetrators merit prosecution under criminal statutes. But such an attempt is not an act of war except in a loose, metaphorical sense. . . . When the word war is taken to justify the arbitrary exercise of power in the absence of war, metaphorical language may become an instrument of tyranny.
On paper, these distinctions seem trite, but they bespeak real and perilous differences—differences for which a serious monk admonished all who would fight to calculate the odds and consequences with a bookkeeper’s punctiliousness, and then engage heart and soul. Long before Sun Tzu was a baby and no doubt well into the future, nations will get their dander up over matters that mystify subsequent generations.
Sun Tzu reminds us that empires, in the Orient or Occident, are lost when inadequate men become leaders and wage war for base reasons or no reason at all. Western history is rife with apt examples: England lost its American colonies because of the fizzle-headed King George III and his tax men; the disaster that was World War I owed much to the folly of aristocrats bent on trying out new weapons; even the Crusades resulted from arrogance and the misbegotten vanity of rulers who did no research before they attacked Palestine. The arch-conservative cartoonist David Low once quipped, “I have never met anyone who wasn’t against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.”
The issue of a “definite objective” is as essential to the successful military mind as its absence is to a defeated one. Sun Tzu often advises shifting points of attack to baffle the enemy and trounce him. For example, in chapter XI, paragraph 37: “By altering his arrangements and changing his plans, he keeps the enemy without definite knowledge. By shifting his camp and taking circuitous routes, he prevents the enemy from anticipating his purpose.” The principle here mimics a wolf pack attacking a bear from every direction. One on one, the bear would naturally succeed against a smaller enemy, but with his energies splayed on so many fronts, he can be defeated.
Throughout the centuries, there is a deliciously romantic quality to China’s intellectuals. Their passion for knowledge and for transmitting it to others is well-nigh a love affair. The genius of Sun Tzu speaks to Everyman, but his heritage speaks particularly to that belief immanent in both high Western, especially Greek, and Asian cultures—“that a coherent and logical explanation of things could be found, that the world did not ultimately rest upon the meaningless and arbitrary fiat of gods or demons” (A Short History of the World ).
In more recent memory, readers who might want to conjure their own image of the spiritual and intellectual impetus that conceived and produced The Art of War might remember the photograph of a small, slender man standing alone before an advancing tank during the 1989 T’iananmen Square Uprising. He could as easily have been Sun Tzu or his descendant Sun Pin, author of a text that has come to be called The Lost Art of War or The Art of War II.
Sun Tzu’s work is a unique admixture of simplicity, an utter absence of self-importance, suffused by the authority born of experience, and a breath-taking determination and passion for “ordering”—for setting the record straight, for getting out the truth, whatever that might be, whatever the consequences. In the pages that follow, you will not find the wicked delight Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance Italian author of The Prince, took in describing the deceptions and stratagems of the profane world. The Art of War is quintessentially Chinese: wise beyond its pages, cryptic, simple, wonderfully profound—and at its root, pacific.
Dallas Galvin is a writer and journalist specializing in international affairs and the arts. She has reported on military affairs in Latin America and Asia and produced documentaries for the NATO Alliance.
To my brother
Captain Valentine Giles, R.C.
in the hope that
a work 2400 years old
may yet contain lessons worth consideration
by the soldier of to-day
this translation
is affectionately dedicated
—Lionel Giles
PREFACE1
by Lionel Giles
THE SEVENTH VOLUME OF “Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages, &c., des Chinois” [Memoirs concerning the history, sciences, arts, habits, customs, etc., of the Chinese; published at Paris in 1782] is devoted to the Art of War, and contains, amongst other treatises, “Les Treize Articles de Sun-tse” [The Thirteen Articles of Sun Tzu], translated from the Chinese by a Jesuit Father, Joseph Amiot. Père Amiot appears to have enjoyed no small reputation as a sinologue in his day, and the field of his labours was certainly extensive. But his so-called translation of Sun Tzu, if placed side by side with the original, is seen at once to be little better than an imposture. It contains a great deal that Sun Tzu did not wri
te, and very little indeed of what he did. . . .
Throughout the nineteenth century, which saw a wonderful development in the study of Chinese literature, no translator ventured to tackle Sun Tzu, although his work was known to be highly valued in China as by far the oldest and best compendium of military science. It was not until the year 1905 that the first English translation, by Captain E. F. Calthrop, R.F.A., appeared at Tokyo under the title “Sonshi” (the Japanese form of Sun Tzu). Unfortunately, it was evident that the translator’s knowledge of Chinese was far too scanty to fit him to grapple with the manifold difficulties of Sun Tzu. He himself acknowledges that without the aid of two Japanese gentlemen “the accompanying translation would have been impossible.” We can only wonder, then, that with their help it should have been so excessively bad. It is not merely a question of downright blunders. . . . Omissions were frequent; hard passages were wilfully distorted or slurred over. . . .
From blemishes of this nature, at least, I believe that the present translation is free. It was not undertaken out of any inflated estimate of my own powers; but I could not help feeling that Sun Tzu deserved a better fate than had befallen him, and I knew that, at any rate, I could hardly fail to improve on the work of my predecessors. . . .